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AND 

THE FAR EAST 








TODAY 




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Blue Waters and Green 



AND 



the ear east today. 



BY 

F. DUMONT SMITH. 



CRANE & COMPANY, 

ToPEKA., Kansas. 

1907. 



_b s soz 



! ««, Copies <«•'« •• 
JUL 29 1^08 






Copyright 1907, by F. Dumont Smith, 
Kinsley, Kansas. 



mosotyped and pkikted by 
cra:.i 

TOPEKA. 



" I stand upon the summit of my life : 
Behind, the camp, the court, the field, the grove, 
The battle and the burden; vast afar 
Beyond these weary ways, behold the Sea. 
The sea, o'erswept by clouds and winds and wings, 
By thoughts and wishes manifold; whose breath 
Is freshness and whose mighty pulse is peace. 

" Palter no question of the horizon dim — 
Cut loose the bark : such voyage is itself a rest. 
Majestic motion, unimpeded scope, 
A widening heaven, current without care. 
Eternity: deliverance, promise, course; 
Time-tired souls salute thee from the shore." 



[3] 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2010 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/bluewatersgreenf01smit 



OONTElvJ-TS. 



Thalassa, ^^^o 

On the Pacific, ...... 7_2i 

Honolulu, 22-39 

J^^^^' 40-69 

^^^^^^' 70-109 

Hong Kong, 110-129 

^^^^ON, J3Q_J5Q 

^^^^^' 151-173 

Shanghai, 174-204 

Japan (continued), 205-289 

Conclusion, 290-293 



Fifty Illustrations. 
Four Drawings by Albert T. Reid. 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 



ON THE PACIFIC, 

I am sure that not one of Xenophon's Ten Thou- 
sand, when they stood upon the last hill and saw the 
iEgean, felt more joy than I when I saw the Pacific 
through the Golden Gate and felt once more the long 
uplift and steady roll of the mile-long swell. 

To them the blue water meant home. • To me it 
means peace — peace and rest. Peace from troubling 
and vexation. Rest from harassing, petty cares; 
rest from strenuous labor ; rest from the task of Sisy- 
phus, the daily rolling of the stone uphill each day re- 
peated. Balm and healing in the sweet sea- wind; 
rest and healing for tired souls and worn-out nerves. 

The sullen trade-wind was desolating San Fran- 
cisco with its daily plague of dust, cold fog and bitter 
keenness when we crossed the chaos that once was 
a city, to the Pacific mail dock. Our ship is the '^ Nip- 

[7] 



THE -FAR EAST TODAY. 

pon Mam/' of the Toyo Kisen Kaisha, that is, the 
Oriental Steamship Company. Everyone knows that 
Nippon is the native name for Japan, and Maru is 
ship. This subsidized Japanese Hne has two other 
ships, the ''Hong Kong Maru" and the ''America 
Maru." Two more are building, to be ready this 
fall, — 18,000-ton leviathans, and then the "Nippon" 
will go on the South-American line, then to be started. 
The captain is an Englishman, forty-eight years a 
master mariner. The doctor, purser, freight clerk, 
head steward, stewardess, are Americans. All else 
are Japs and Chinese. The other officers, navigators, 
engineer's staff, coal-passers, and sailors, are all Japs. 
The stewards, cabin-boys and waiters are all Chinese. 
Our boy is a Cantonese, who are said to be the best 
of the Chinese servants, and Ah Wing is as near per- 
fection as it is given to mortal man to be. Tall, 
slender, his face the color of old ivory, he wears an 
expression of dignified cheerfulness, courtesy and 
goodness; soft-footed, tireless, kindly and consider- 
ate. Ah Wing deserves a better pen than mine to tell 
of his virtues. His English vocabulary is limited, 
but suffices. "Catchee" and '^makee" are his prin- 
cipal verbs, and serve all purposes. "Catchee" is 

[8] 



ON THE PACIFIC. 

to get, find, bring, and twenty other things. '^ Makee" 
is to do, perform, furnish, and so on. 

This morning I said: ^^Ah Wing, where are my 
coat-hangers?" 

''Me catchee him." 

He looked and looked, and finally said sorrowfully, 
''No can catchee." 

Then suddenly he remembered. "Missee makee 
him." 

F. had used it. 

"Ah Wing, ask the purser to send me some pen- 
cils." 

"Allitee; me catchee him." 

Returned. "Makee sharp," and there were my 
pencils, beautifully pointed. 

The ladies always take breakfast in bed, and Ah 
Wing always tempts them with the best the table 
affords. 

' ' Stlawbellies bottom side . You like stlawbellies ? ' ' 
And the fruit appears with crushed ice and pulverized 
sugar so served that it tempts even a seasick stom- 
ach. 

Ah Wing knows just how malted milk should be 
served; he knows when to be silent. He can smile 

[9] 



THE'FAR EAST TODAY. 

without moving a muscle. Only a Chinaman can 
do that. Few ladies in Kansas keep their houses as 
he keeps our suite. 

In the morning he wears a long blue cotton gown 
to his heels, and his glossy queue is wrapped about his 
head. But at the table — for he waits on the table, 
too — he appears in spotless white and his queue hangs 
to his waist, the pride of his heart, the emblem of his 
race, sanctified by his religion, without w^hich he 
would be disgraced. 

The routine of the ship is much the same as on the 
Atlantic. At 7 : 30 the boy serves coffee and toast in 
your room; at 8:30, breakfast; at 11:00, bouillon 
and crackers; lunch at 1:00; tea at 4:00; and 
dinner at 7 : 00 ; sandwiches and the like in the smok- 
ing-room all the time. 

There are seven meals a day if you take them all. 
However, they are not served by the hours, but by 
the ''bells." The clockwork regularity of the ship's 
housekeeping is measured by a sweet-toned bell on 
the forward deck, struck every half -hour. Eight 
A. M. is eight bells. Then it starts with one bell for 
8 : 30, two bells for 9 o'clock, and an additional bell 
for each half-hour until eight bells is again reached, 

[10] 



ON THE PACIFIC. 

at noon. Again, they start with one bell until 4 
o'clock, when eight bells is again reached. The origin 
of the custom is lost in antiquity. But like most 
sea customs, it never changes. That is a curious 
thing. The conservatism of seafaring men is the 
cause of it. The vast change from sail to steam has 
changed marine nomenclature and usage but little — 
just added some new occupations and terms for them. 

In front of my window some Jap sailors on the for- 
ward deck are making a new awning, and making 
it just as the sailors of Columbus made a sail four 
hundred years ago. They squat on the sail and push 
the needle through with a leather palm-guard instead 
of a thimble. 

Every sailor w^ars a sheath-knife at the back of 
his belt, so that a lashing may be cut quickly to loosen 
the boat or let a sail go. There is often no time to 
open a pocket-knife. Also, it is handy in a scrap. 
We still have '4abboard" and ''stabboard" watches, 
and the two dog watches, as they have been denom- 
inated from time immemorial, — ^the former two of 
eight hours each, the latter four each. 

Sailor-men are like the English : they can adopt a 
new thing, but they will never do an old thing a new 

[11] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 



way. Thus, the EngUsh adopted the telephone and 
other Yankee inventions quickly, but they will con- 
tinue their abominable baggage system till the end 
of time. The London & Northwestern tried to in- 
troduce our system of checking baggage. They even 
went further. They offered to call for your trunk in 
London, for instance, and deliver it to your address 
in Edinburgh for the small sum of a shilling, — 24 
cents. Nay, nay. Our Briton refused, and con- 
tinues to pile his trunk on a '^four-wheeler" and stand 
in the rain at his destination and identify it, rather 
than do the old thing in a new way. So sailor-men, 
be they English, Japs, Yankees or Portuguese, will 
be sailor-men till men no longer ''go down to the sea 
in ships," until we quit the sea and take to the air. 

Our passenger list is a small one — ^less than half our 
capacity, and not as motley as usual. We are the 
only tourists. All the rest are going on their affairs 
of blood or business, visiting kinfolk across the sea 
or going to their occupations in foreign parts. There 
are half a dozen young fellows going to Manila in our 
civil service there — clerks and the like. There is a 
captain of native constabulary returning from a va- 

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ON THE PACIFIC 



cation. There is the Inspector of PubHc Buildings 
for Manila, one of the finest Dutchmen I ever met, a 
world- wanderer who knows Kowloon and Callao, 
Singapore and Aden, and all the strange placed of 
the earth, as familiarly as I know Kansas, a tramp 
royal whose home is under his hat, who has the gift 
of tongues, a seeing eye, plays all the games ever 
invented and plays them well, and is the best smoking- 
room company you can imagine. 

There is the young doctor from Manila who has his 
bride with him, a fair-faced girl from the States 
whom he is taking back to the Islands to slowly stew 
her life out, lose that fresh complexion, and likely 
fill one of the new graves in the rapidly growing 
American cemetery. Women die quickly out there. 

There are Jack and Jean, two eight-year-olds, going 
with their mother, the wife of a St. Louis editor, to 
visit their sister, an army officer's wife, at Manila. 
Jack and Jean are twins, and their eighth birthday 
happened Monday, and dear old Captain Filmer had 
a whacking big birthday cake for them and gave them 
each a '^Nippon Maru" stick-pin. Jack ate his cake 
in silence, but Jean insisted upon everyone's having 
a share, down to the cabin-boys. They are the pets 

[13] 



THE' FAR EAST TODAY. 

of the ship, sweet-faced, clear-eyed American chil- 
dren. 

As a contrast to them there is their constant com- 
panion, the little Moro boy of the same age. Two 
school-teachers from the Islands accompany him, 
going back to their work after a brief vacation. His 
parents were killed in a raid, and these good women 
adopted him and he has been two years at school in 
Minneapolis at their expense. Now they are taking 
him home, and hope for great things of him. He is 
noisy, forward, a little overbearing with Jack, yet 
withal good-natm-ed and kindly, and has manners 
better than most American children. He has a tre- 
mendous physique for his age, and looks as if he would 
be a leader when he gets his growth. 

There are two Chinamen who have made their 
fortime in South America and are going home to 
enjoy it. One of them has his wife with him, who 
looks like a nice Chinese doll, and says "Buenas dias" 
in the prettiest way when you bow^ to her, and always 
shakes hands with all the ladies in the morning. 

There is a buyer for a great New York importing 
house who goes to the Orient with carte blanche to 
buy bronzes, porcelains, embroideries and art objects 

[14] 



ON THE PACIFIC. 

with no limit set on his expenditure. He knows 
Japanese art, and can tell china of one period from 
another; keeps an office in Yokohama and another 
in Osake, just to gather up rare things. He has been 
everywhere, spent his life in learning and buying 
what is the choicest of the art of all countries, and his 
stories of '^ finds" and how and where he found them 
would fill a volume. 

And then there is the Governor. I leave him till the 
last intentionally, and leave him here for the present. 
You will know more of him^ if you read these pages. 
I mean to make you like him as well as I do, for I 
have promised to break my trip at Manila and spend 
a week with him at his capital, Benguet, which is also 
the summer capital now, of the Islands, from whence 
he rules some sixty thousand of the former head- 
hunters, Igorrotes, but lately the wildest of the wild 
tribes. He deserves a chapter to himself, and shall 
have it. As one of our first proconsuls, ruling with 
power of life and death over thousands, as a type of the 
men we are sending out there to take up the white 
man's burden, he surpasses in interest to me all the rest. 

The first night out from Frisco we stepped on the 
[15] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

tail of a westerly gale. It had passed us, but we got a 
touch of it, and I awoke in the night to feel the swift 
upheave as we struck the quartering seas, the roll to 
starboard, the downward plunge and the reverse roll. 
To me it was delightful. As a child I used to swing 
the other children till they fell out and went away 
to relieve their diaphragms. I never wearied of it, 
and nothing is so like a swing as a small ship in a sea. 
But it was far otherwise with the rest. F. yielded 
up her dinner without a protest. A. was '^just 
dizzy," and took to her berth; and at breakfast but 
five of us showed up. All day we climbed the great 
swells on a slant and bobbed and ducked and side- 
stepped and pitched and rolled. Coming so soon after 
the start, it slew the best of them. It was surely 
a test, and at night the Governor and I were the only 
occupants of the smoking-room. I have crossed the 
Irish Channel when every passenger but myself was 
sick, and this was as bad. By morning it had mod- 
erated, and at the end of a couple of days most of the 
invalids were on deck. F. suffered less than usual, 
and is well enough to-day to think of her appearance, 
which clearly indicates convalescence. I have hopes 
of making a sailor of her yet. 

[16] 



ON THE PACIFIC 



When we left Frisco the sea was breaking heavily 
over the bar; the famous ^^ potato patch/' where 
many a tall ship has gone down, and so called because 
in the early days a brig loaded with potatoes struck 
and went to pieces there. Along the shore the water 
was green, a clear cobalt as shallow salt water usually 
is, but when we had rounded the bar on the north 
and dropped our pilot and set our course southeasterly, 
straight for Honolulu twenty-one hundred miles 
away, we found the true '^ blue water," ''out of sound- 
ings" as sailors say. And what a blue is the Pacific! 
It is almost a color by itself. The ordinary hues 
fail to fully describe it. More like indigo than any- 
thing else, so deep, so dark, so solid and impenetrable 
to the eye, yet gemmed with brilliants at the touch 
of every breeze. To-day the sky is a true turquoise, 
the same, I doubt not, that arches over Kansas, and 
this ocean blue fades the sky by contrast, makes the 
azure looked washed out and pale. Its blue is in- 
extinguishable. In sun or storm, by day or night, 
clear or cloudy the sky, there is that same profound, 
unchanging blue. 

This morning when the sun rose it came to us down 
a sea pathway of molten silver burnished to a degree 

[17] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

intolerable to the eye. Nothing but the sun can 
change this blue — and that to something more won- 
derful. 

I was trying to shave this morning with my 
bath-room window open (we have a bath-room as 
big as an ordinary hotel room); trying to shave, for 
I was constantly rushing to the window to watch 
perpetually new effects from the sunrise, new showers 
of diamonds scattered on the sea floor by the breeze, 
when I saw my first flying-fish. A little bird, brown 
on the back, white beneath, sprang from a white- 
topped wave, and skimmed away like a swallow. 
It was a fish, and it really flies. I had supposed they 
only leaped, but they fly, fly with wings like a bird 
and with the same motion; but they can fly only so 
long as their wings are wet. When these dry out in 
the air they must dip again and wet their wings. I 
saw one skim and dip and rise again for fully a hun- 
dred yards. They grow a foot in length, and when 
full grown have two full sets of wings. 

When we left the harbor the white gulls followed 
us for a day, and left us. They nest by thousands on 
the Farallones, rocky islets forty miles out, and are 
the scavengers of the harbor. 

[18] 



ON THE PACIFIC. 

The second day the albatross joined us. Whence 
he came no one knows, where he nests and raises his 
young no one on the ship knows, how he picked up 
our ship no one knows. There are a dozen of them, 
and they will follow us till we sight Honolulu and 
then leave us to the harbor gulls and pick up some 
outgoing ship. On tireless wing they follow us — 
circle, pursue, retreat, appear and disappear, flying 
in a day not less than two thousand miles, and usually 
without the movement of a wing. They merely sail 
as a ship does, with wide wings atilt, to right or left, 
up or down, taking advantage of every slant of air. 
If weary, they settle on the water, and, head beneath 
a wing, sleep as quietly as the barnyard fowl on its 
roost. 

At certain hours well known to the birds, the refuse 
of the meal is thrown overboard, and they settle to 
their feast and we miss them for an hour or two. 
Then they overtake us and resume their tireless cir- 
cling about the ship. 

Tonight we saw the Southern Cross for the first 
time, just above the horizon. I had not expected to 
see it in such high latitudes, but there it is, clear and 
splendid, the most perfect of all the constellations, 

[19] 



THE' FAR EAST TODAY. 

most perfect because it is truly proportioned, each 
star in its exact position, each equally and superla- 
tively brilliant. We shall lose it when we turn north 
to Yokohama, and find it again on the road to Ma- 
nila. Somehow it is an epoch. It marks and con- 
notes the strange new world we are in, so foreign to 
all we have known. We feel far away and very 
lonely, this speck on the infinite sea, this atom on 
the illimitable waste. If there is anywhere a place 
where man acknowledges his littleness and turns to a 
Higher Power it is at sea ; and so when Sunday came 
we all went to service in the dining-room. There is 
no clergyman aboard, and so the '^Old Man," the Cap- 
tain, read the Episcopal service and read it beauti- 
fully. He is simply and sincerely religious, believes 
in the Book ^^from kiver to kiver," albeit he can cuss 
the pitch out of the seams and make even a Malay 
turn pale. He is great on exegesis. Has it all worked 
out, can explain all the miracles, and is especially 
strong on Revelation. Certainly it was moving to 
see that old white-haired seaman who has followed the 
roughest of all occupations, who has been ship- 
wrecked, fought for his life in seaport rows, quelled a 
mutiny with a belaying-pin, and dealt with the rudest 

[20] 



ON THE PACIFIC 



and most profane of the world's citizens, kneel and 
in unfeigned piety commend himself to the care of 
God as simply as a child at its mother's knee. He is 
fine, that old man, and when I take off my cap to 
his cheery morning greeting I bow to one of the best 
of that '^ Ancient Order of Gentlemen." 

Diamond Head is in sight, and tomorrow we shall 
^^do" Honolulu. 



[21] 



HON OLULU. 

Mark Twain visited Hawaii in 1869, shortly before 
his trip abroad, and his letters from there gave him 
his first reputation. 

In 1896, on his tour of the world, which is described 
in '^Following the Equator," he was to lecture there, 
but an outbreak of cholera prevented his landing, 
and he never saw it again. It was a bitter disappoint- 
ment to him, and in his book you will find this writ- 
ten of Hawaii : 

''No alien land in all the world has any deep strong 
charm for me but that one; no other land could so 
longingly and beseechingly haunt me sleeping and 
waking through half a lifetime, as that one has done. 
Other things leave me, but it abides; other things 
change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy 
airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in 
the sun, the pulsing of its surf-beat is in my ear; I 
can see its garlanded crags, its leaping cascades, its 
plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote sum- 
mits floating like islands above the cloud-rack; I 
can feel the spirit of its woodland solitude, I can hear 
the splash of its brooks ; in my nostrils still lives the 
breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago." 

[22] 



HONOLULU 



Does this seem like exaggeration? Go to Honolulu 
and see. 

A world-wanderer, he had seen everything with a 
seeing and discriminating eye, and in his old age Hono- 
lulu comes back to him as the most beautiful spot in 
the traveled world. 

It is so. I have seen something of the earth's 
beauty-spots, and when the last call comes, '^from la- 
bor to refreshment," I want to go to Hawaii. 

The merest enumeration of its physical advantages 
is astonishing. Lying on the twenty-first parallel, 
it produces everything of the tropics, but the temper- 
ature never goes above 90. Always cooled by the 
Trades, laden with the ocean ozone, there is no lassi- 
tude in its air, no vitality-sapping heat, none of the 
lethargy, the physical and moral deterioration that 
marks the countries along the line. 

On the contrary, people from ''the States" thrive 
there, are active, energetic, progressive, and aggressive. 
Their children are healthy, strong, and vigorous. 

There is not a poisonous reptile or a noxious plant 
in these ''Blessed Isles." 

Its flowers are always blooming and always fragrant. 
The soil of decomposed tufa is astonishingly fertile, 

[23] 



THE' FAR EAST TODAY. 

inexhaustible, kindly, easily tilled. Every day there 
are Hght showers, and the absence of dust, the amaz- 
ing verdance of its luxuriant vegetation, the cool, 
washed and sparkling air, delight, bewilder, and ex- 
hilarate. 

The green valleys are frowned upon by stupendous 
volcanic cliffs, nearly always topped with floating 
cloud-rack, and wreathed far down with feathery 
vapor. Do\\Ti their stern faces, softened here and 
there by clinging vines and strange plants, rush 
innumerable cascades, here foaming with voluminous 
thundering, there lacing the rocks with tenuous spray. 
Set this in an incomparable sea, whose near-by color 
exhausts every green of the palette, broken by the 
flashing surf, and whose further distance melts from 
cobalt to turquoise, from turquoise to indigo, thence 
to purple, until you lose the sense of color and at the 
last perceive only vastness, space without limit, and 
where will you match it? 

It is a poet's vision wrought out and made real, 
an earthly paradise. 

I shall not tell you of the material conditions of the 
islands. 

I am told it is a rich man's country. That living 

[24] 



HONOLULU 



is expensive, wages low ; that a few large proprietors 
own all the fertile land; that sugar is low and the 
country not as prosperous as it was under the mon- 
archy ; that Uncle Sam collects in the way of tariffs 
and internal revenue twice as much as he spends there. 
I do not know. You can find these things in the 
Blue Books. 

I enjoyed Hawaii with my senses, and let my brain 
rest. I care nothing for exports from Paradise; 
statistics of Eden would be a desecration. There 
was no census-taker in the first Garden. I did not go 
below that enchanting surface to learn the compara- 
tive imits of income and outgo. 

The people seemed well dressed, well housed. Cer- 
tainly they are cheerful, and life seems to have a zest 
for them that Pittsburg and Packington cannot show. 

Doubtless the natives do not ride in top buggies, 
nor have pianos and lace curtains. But they have 
each a little garden, a bread-fruit tree and a banana, 
and that suffices, for they have all about them pic- 
tures such as no artist ever painted. Air, freedom, 
space, and in their hearts the wisdom of a people who 
find contentment in the things they have. They are 
happy: what more is there? The poorest in his tiny 

[25] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

hut on the slopes of the PaU, singing his soft Ha- 
waiian songs, is happier than Morgan and Rocke- 
feller, so I waste no pity on him, — he does not need it. 
On the docks I saw a grimy stevedore, half-naked, 
plashed with sweat, but about his ragged hat was a 
wreath of flowers that money could not buy in the 
States. Incongruous? Yes, elsewhere, but here nat- 
ural; he would not work without them. To him, 
there in the stifling warehouse, they mean his little 
home, where he will go when he has earned a few dol- 
lars. They bring him a breath of the open, the fra- 
grance and greenness of this, his land. They are to 
him what a drink or a smoke is to the New York or 
London stevedore, and it marks character, the aes- 
thetic touch and love of nature that this beautiful sum- 
mer-land has nourished in her poorest and lowliest 

Honolulu is modern, up-to-date, with wide, well- 
paved streets, stately business blocks, and as fine an 
electric car system as you shall find anywhere. Each 
house is detached, and each unlike the other. And 
about each a wealth of strange blooms, flowering 
trees, fronded palms, bizarre exotic luxuriance, so 
that every house is a picture by itself. 

[26] 



HONOLULU. 



Through avenues of the stately '^ royal palm," 
white, smooth columns crowned with a burst of feath- 
ery foliage, you see wide-eaved houses, each with its 
"lanai," a sort of outdoor sitting-room, roofed and 
sheltered with woven jalousies, the living-room of the 
house. 

The lawn is a native grass, almost equal to blue- 
grass. Here is the Ponciana Regia, the most gorgeous 
of all flowering trees, whose perfect umbrella top is 
green beneath and scarlet above, with its mass of 
great flame-colored flowers that rest on the green 
fronds as though they were strewn there by hand. 
The Bougainvillea, a tree with purple flowers; the 
"pink shower" and the ''yellow shower" trees, cov- 
ered with pink and yellow flowers ; the Algeroba, the 
rubber tree, cocoa palms, bread-fruit, papai, that 
bears a melon much like our cantaloupe; the alligator 
pear, used for salads, and countless others, novel in 
form and bewildering in variety. Every outlook 
entices, every aspect allures. You are reluctant to 
pass, yet loth to linger, for an ever-new vista draws 
you on. 

We took an automobile up to the Pali, the great 
cliff, where Kamehameha, after defeating the last of 

[27] 



THE- FAR EAST TODAY. 

his enemies, drove them over its height to destruction 
and became the Napoleon of the Pacific. 

The road follows the Nuuanu Valley to its source, 
winding upward to the pass at its head, where you 
look across a green valley to the other side of the 
island, and where the Trades accumulating in the 
valley funnel rush through the narrow pass with the 
force of a hurricane. The ride down of six miles is 
the most glorious I have ever taken. You slide down 
and dip and turn and wind between great volcanic 
cliffs wrapped with cloud- wreaths, barred with patches 
of green and cleft with gorges holding each its water- 
fall. At a turn, you see below you the town set in 
greenery, the harbor green and opalescent, the reefs 
beyond, where the surf breaks into spray, and beyond 
all, the purpling sea. A picture never to be forgotten. 

Then there is Waikiki Beach, most beautiful of 
the world's sea marges. It lies in a two-mile crescent 
of golden sand, protected from the sharks by the 
outer reef of coral, over which the great Pacific comb- 
ers break with foam and shouting and then come 
rushing to the shore in long green rollers that furnish 
the famous surf-riding of the Islands. They come in 
with a velocity as high as 40 miles an hour, and the 

[28] 



HONOLULU 



natives ride them in a canoe or even on a board, 
keeping the crest of a wave until it breaks on the 
beach. The water shoals so gradually that there is 
little danger, and it affords a novel sensation for the 
most jaded tourist to come hurling landward on a 
ten-foot wave where the wrong turn of a paddle means 
a capsize. 

There is a school-house at Waikiki taught by a 
native girl, where Hawaiians, Japs and Chinese, the 
motley offspring of the Islands, learn English. It was 
wonderful to see those young heathen follow Yan- 
kee ways, for the school is strictly on American hues. 
The discipline is perfect, and their progress amazing. 
The teacher told them a little Chinese fairy story, and 
then each wrote it down in his own way in English. 
Here is one of them written by a Chinese boy of eight, 
in a fair plain hand. Mark the grammar and choice 
of words: 

''Once upon a time there lived a man called Hok 
Tee. People thought he was a good man, but he was 
not. He used to steal. No one thought Hok Tee 
was a thief. One day Hok Tee's cheek began to 
swell. He went to the doctor. The doctor said, 
'You have been doing something wrong. The gods 
are angry with you.' Hok Tee gave his money to 
the doctor. The doctor sent him to the dwarfs. 

[29] 



THE? FAR EAST TODAY. 

Hok Tee went to the dwarfs' tree and hid himself in 
the branches. He fell and hurt himself. The dwarfs 
made Hok Tee dance. They were not pleased with 
his dancing. The next full moon, Hok Tee went 
again. He begged them to cure him. They cured 
him." 

How is that for Ah Po, aged eight? My copy is 
exact, and you will see that there is not an error in 
it of any kind. How many Kansas boys of eight 
can do as well? And there is no race trouble between 
them. They all learn quickly and play together as 
though they were of one blood. The Island schools 
are fine and the literacy of the people already high. 

One of the sights of the world is the Aquarium at 
Waikiki. The fish are all from Island waters, some 
two hundred varieties. The food fish of these waters 
are unsurpassed; the mullet, sea-bass, sea-salmon 
and many others constituting the main food supply 
of the Asiatics and natives; but the Aquarium is just 
to show what Neptune can produce when he gets gay. 
No opium-smoker, hasheesh drunkard or delirium 
tremens victim ever imagined such grotesque and out- 
rageous forms. There are fish with hands, with gills 
in their fins, with horns and spikes and sails; fish that 

[30] 



HONOLULU. 



sit on their tails and look at you with human eyes; 
fish with hair and fur; fish striped, streaked, spotted, 
mottled, cross-barred, checkered and dyed every with 
color, primary and derivative; fish with heads like a 
horse, like a man, like a bull, like a frog, and fish with 
no heads at all. There are monstrous crayfish, big 
as a tub, crabs with six claws and the Lord knows 
what else. It took me an hour to get sober, or feel 
sober again when I got through. The wonders of 
the deep down here surpass the visions of Revelation, 
but for me, let me have my staid, unassuming, sober- 
jacketed old friends, the bass and crappie. This 
foppery of the brine, like that of the land, goes with 
uselessness except to look at. 

In a big tank on the shore is a man-eating shark, 
recently caught. The shark alone of all fish, will not 
live in captivity. With the best of care, four weeks 
is the limit of his life in a tank. His fierce and restless 
spirit will not brook confinement nor live within 
limits. His companion is an ancient sea-turtle who 
looks as though he might be the father of the breed. 
He weighs at least three hundred pounds and the moss 
on his back is an inch long, and he looks as hoary 
and antique as the Coliseum. The waters about the 

[ 31 ] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

islands are full of them, and if there is anything more 
delicious than green-turtle steak, I want to see it. 

These waters are also full of sharks, man-eaters all, 
tiger sharks, they call them. Inside the reef at 
Waikiki, bathing is safe; elsewhere is it pretty near 
suicide. A week ago a stranger went in swimming 
off Diamond Head. Yesterday they found his ring 
and some buttons in a shark. Hie jacet. And they 
did not even bury the shark. Saves embalming and 
funeral expenses, but bad for the undertaker. 

It is said by some that a shark will not bite a ka- 
naka ; cannot, is more like it, for a shark will eat any- 
thing and bite at anything. The kanaka is quicker 
in the water than a shark, and hunts him in his own 
element for the sport of it. Also, sharks' teeth are 
salable and sharks' fins make good soup. 

One of the favorite ways of killing sharks sounds 
incredible, but is common enough here. The kanaka 
swims out beyond the reef with a hardwood stick, 
sharp at both ends, a foot or more in length. AVhen 
a shark engages him he waits until the shark opens 
his mouth to bite, to do which he must turn on his 
back, as his upper jaw projects a foot beyond the lower 
The kanaka jams the stick into the shark's mouth, 

[32] 



HONOLULU. 



and when he shuts his jaw, expecting to find a kanaka 
leg in it, he transfixes his jaw fast on the sharp ends 
of the stick and is helpless. The kanaka rips him 
open with his knife and tows him ashore. Naturally 
it takes an expert swimmer to do it, and the kanakas 
are that and then some. 

Here are a couple of true stories of what they can 
do in the water: 

The '^Nippon Maru" was ready to sail from Hon- 
olulu once, and only awaiting an Island steamer 
from Pearl Harbor with bananas. The little side- 
, wheel boat was in the channel outside when a cona, 
a sort of typhoon, came up. These winds are much 
dreaded in the Islands, as they get up a terrific sea in 
a few minutes. Within five minutes the little side- 
wheeler was capsized. She carried a crew of five 
kanakas and one American, the engineer, who had 
but one leg. The crew of the '^Nippon Maru " wanted 
to launch the lifeboat and go to their rescue, but the 
captain refused. He had had much experience in 
these waters, and he knew no boat could live in that 
sea. The harbor was thronged with people watching 
the tragedy, powerless to help the doomed men. 
Presently in the smother of spray just outside the 

[33] 



THE' FAR EAST TODAY. 

reef appeared a black head, another, and then an- 
other. The three dived through the surf that broke 
over the reef, and were soon inside the breakwate 
of the reef and swimming easily for shore. Still the 
crowd watched ; the one-legged engineer was of course 
drowned. (No man with one leg can swim; that 
is curious, for a one-armed man can.) But there 
might be another kanaka saved, and boats put out 
as far as it was safe, inside the reef. Presently in 
the boiling smother, worse than Niagara where it 
breaks to its fall, appeared three heads. The two 
kanakas were bringing the helpless engineer in, and 
they did it. They dived through the awful surf and 
brought him over the reef, alive but unconscious. 
The kanakas were but little the worse for it. And 
mark you, they brought that helpless engineer through 
a sea in which experts agreed no boat could live. 

Did anyone say anything about swimming? 

Here is another: 

Molly Bush was quite noted as an Island beauty. 
Her father was an Englishman, her mother a Hawai- 
ian. Mentally her education was English, physically 
Hawaiian. She was going from Oahu to Hilo on one 
of the island steamers. She was the only Hawaiian 

[34] 



HONOLULU 



passenger; all the rest were Japs. A cona came up. 
The captain saw that his boat was about to founder, 
and lowered his small boats. The sea was so rough 
that the boats had to keep at a distance on a riding 
line; the passengers were lowered into the sea and 
drawn to the boats. When the captain offered to 
tie the rope around Miss Molly's shapely waist she 
indignantly refused. 

'^ Go in a boat with those Japs? Go into the water 
with a rope around me ? Nonsense!" 

The captain remonstrated. He wanted to save her 
life. He would be much criticized if he let pretty 
Molly Bush, the Rose of the Islands, drown. Her 
reply was emphatic. She stripped off her clothes, 
tied them to her shoulders, and swam ashore. The 
Japs were all drowned. It was another case of swim- 
ming through a sea where a boat could not live. 

Readers of ''Paul and Virginia," even those who 
have wept over its finish, will agree with me, that 
MoUy had more sense than Virginia. 

I could multiply these tales. The kanakas think 
nothing of swimming from Mau to Hawaii, 31 miles. 
In fact, there is no record of the death of any Islander 
in water. He may drown himself in rum or gin, es- 

[35] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

pecially the latter, of which he is very fond, but you 
cannot hurt him in the water. 

When our boat entered the harbor, a dozen half- 
grown boys sw^am out to meet us and dived for pennies 
and nickels and never lost one. One boy, to show 
off, came up feet first, with the nickel between his 
toes. The captain wanted the ship's bottom exam- 
ined, and one of the natives took a rock in his arms and 
descended to the keel, and in four trips worked her 
entire length. 

Coming out, the boys swarmed up the sides of the 
ship, dived from her bridge, thirty feet, and climbed 
aboard and dived again until the sailors drove them 
off. 

A little touch of race feeling happened here. Arra, 
the Moro boy, pushed one of the kanaka boys as he 
was about to dive. When he came up he threatened 
to come back and slap the Moro. ''Ah, get out, you 
nigger!" said Arra. Arra was seven shades darker 
than the kanaka, nearly black, in fact, but he has been 
in the States at school and considers himself white. 
The kanaka was probably three-quarters white. 
There is hardly any pure kanaka blood in the Islands, 
even in the Royal family. My chauffeur, w^hen I 

[36] 



HONOLULU. 



asked him his nationahty, answered proudly, ^'I am 
three-quarter wite." Down South, the worst in- 
sult is for one darky to call another, '^You black nig- 
ger!" That means razors, sure. The descendants 
of Ham, the world over, seem to be proud of any white 
blood. The word '^nigger" doesn't go as an insult 
on the Islands, but '^savage" does. I heard one 
kanaka boy say to another, '^Go on, you savage; 
your father ate Captain Cook." That closed the ar- 
gument. Vituperation could go no further. 

As a matter of fact, the Islanders are said to be of 
Arabian descent, and came here in canoes about 800 
years ago. They are a kindly and gentle people. 
They love flowers, music, and the dance. Their 
music has a wonderful rhythm to it, wholly unlike 
that of any of the South Sea peoples. It is dreamy, 
sensuous, with an undertone of melancholy. Their 
stringed orchestras are fine, and when they play dance 
music they sing to it. F. says their music is the best 
she ever danced to. 

Nothing shows their character more fitly than their 
salutations: '^ Aloha" — ^^Love," or ^^Love to you." 
The English '^How do you do?" the French ''How 
do you carry yourself?" the German ''How goes it?" 

L37;] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

are like a blow in the face compared to this kindly, 
affectionate greeting. 

They are not industrious nor thrifty; they have 
lost their patrimony in these beautiful islands. The 
rapacious American and German have wrested from 
them their homes. The Japs have taken their work. 
They are a vanishing race, already dwindled in sev- 
enty years from three hundred thousand to forty 
thousand. 

I suppose the exploitation of the Islands by foreign 
capital makes for ''progress." It means more sugar, 
more exports. Flowers and music and song and 
kindly courtesy have no commercial value. 

The ''lei" girls, with their strings of exquisite 
flowers, represent no increment of capital. This is 
the Twentieth Century, and it has no room for leisure, 
for song and fragrance, for courtesy and happy loiter- 
ing. The yellow man and the brown must bow his 
back to the task the white man sets, or get off the 
earth. And he is getting off. The white man's rum 
and the white man's vices finish him quickly. 

Soon there will be no Islanders, no "lei" girls, no 
brown bodies diving through the great combers or 
riding the surf in happy idleness, no songs and dances 

[38] 



HONOLULU. 



and flowers; — just sugar, sugar and tobacco, and a 
''prosperous community." May I not live to see the 
day. 

Good-by, Hawaii, 'Tearl of the Pacific" : Aloha, — 
love to you. 



[39] 



JAPAN. 

"At the end of the fight, 
A tombstone white, 

And the name of the late deceased. 
An epitaph drear, 
'A fool lies here 

Who tried to hustle the East.' " 

We have crossed the Pacific 6,000 miles, skirted the 
southern shores of Japan, passed through the Inland 
Sea, and are now in the China Sea sailing south for 
Manila, where we shall arrive the 27th. 

We have been on the ''Nippon" twenty-five days, 
and shall be with it off and on till July 11th, — a long, 
long trip. 

We have touched at Yokohama, Kobe and Naga- 
saki, and have seen a little of Japan. We shall spend 
three weeks in traveling over it on our way home, and 
I shall defer any extended description of the country 
till later. 

The geography of Japan is an irregular capital L, 
with Yokohama at the southeast heel, from whence 
it stretches northerly 300 miles to the sea of Okhotsk 
and westwardly about the same to Nagasaki. Yoko- 

[40] 



JAPAN. 



hama is the chief port of the Islands, but twenty-eight 
miles from the capital, and is one of the greatest ship- 
ping centers of the world. 

Steamers touch or start from here for America, the 
PhiUppines, Australia, China, Europe, and nearly all 
the ports of the world. Its magnificent harbor is 
crowded with sails from every sea and the flags of 
every nation. 

Here the East and West meet and the tides of ocean 
commerce from every sea pay tribute and pour their 
wealth into its lap. 

It is a curious mixture of Old and New Japan, of 
the Occident and the Orient,— indescribable, fascinat- 
ing, with a flavor like those strange condiments that 
the East produces. The railroad system of the Is- 
lands converges here. You may see Fujiyama from 
its streets on a clear day. You may ride in an au- 
tomobile or a rickshaw. You may stop at an Amer- 
ican hotel with every luxury, or at a Japanese inn 
where you furnish your own bedding and have a 
miniature sawhorse for a pillow. You may have the 
ways and the luxuries, the food and drink of the West, 
yet savor the strange exotic scents and flavors of the 
Far East. 

[;41:] 



THE- FAR EAST TODAY. 

Its situation is superb. Its harbor one of the best 
in the world, and its foreign population as well as trade 
are growing by leaps and bounds. 

There is much talk of war in Yokohama, but it will 
not come, not now ; later it may. The war talk comes 
from parliamentary groups in opposition to the gov- 
ernment, and a few Jingo new^spapers. The rulers of 
Japan do not want it now. They know that Japan 
is too poor. Of course the hoodlums of San Fran- 
cisco may precipitate us at any moment into a war. 
A few more outrages on the Japanese may so increase 
the popular feeling here that the government's hand 
may be forced, for Japan has a popular government 
and freedom of the press. As an instance of the ef- 
forts the government is making to preserve peace, 
the Tokio Puck, a comic illustrated paper, had a car- 
toon showing Uncle Sam as a lion crushing a Japanese 
in his jaw:s, with the legend underneath: ''We may 
have to take a gun to the American Lion as we did 
to the Russian Bear." The government could not 
suppress it, but it bought up and destroyed the entire 
issue, — fearful of the results on popular feeling. They 
are a proud, high-spirited people, perhaps a little cocky 

[42] 



JAPAN 



over their recent achievements ; and who shall blame 
them for resenting the repeated attacks on their 
people? If Americans were being mobbed daily on 
the streets of Tokio, and their property wantonly 
destroyed, we should know how they feel. Yet we are 
treated everywhere with the utmost courtesy and 
kindliness, not only in the shops, but on the streets and 
highways. The wrong is ours, and they are showing 
great forbearance. One comfort: if San Francisco 
involves us in war she will be the first and principal 
sufferer. Already measures are taken to route exports 
to America by Seattle and to boycott San Francisco. 

Rounding the southeasterly point of Japan, we saw 
the wreck of the '^Dakota," that struck a rock and 
sunk there last February. This was one of the Great 
Northern Line, the other being the '^Minnesota" 
that was established two years ago by Jim Hill. 
They were monster boats, 20,000 tons register, 28,000 
tons gross, the biggest on the Pacific. Great things 
were predicted of what they would do for our carry- 
ing trade. They were to be the start of our new com- 
merce on the Pacific. They have done nothing but 
lose money from the start. The " Dakota " was losing 



THE'FAR EAST TODAY. 

fifty thousand a month when she sunk. She was in- 
sured for her full value, three and one-half millions. 
Sailor-men wink and put their tongues in their cheeks 
when they talk of it. She was a mile out of her course, 
in full daylight, and so close to the shore that people 
could be seen on shore waving her off and seeking to 
warn her of the danger. She struck a rock that broke 
her back and sunk in twenty minutes. There was 
not even time to get her mails out. The passengers 
were all taken off by native boats — sampans — and 
no lives were lost, as the da}^ was clear and the sea 
smooth, which made it the more inexplicable. The 
captain lost his certificate, but the insurance money 
was not put into a new ship, and the ''Minnesota" 
remains the only one of the line. 

The bay of Tokio in which Yokohama lies is su- 
perb; ten miles wide at its entrance and narrowing 
gradually. To obtain suitable defenses the Japs have 
built three artificial islands, mounted with disappear- 
ing guns, so that the harbor is impregnable to a fleet 
attack. This is true of all their harbors. Each is 
defended by every device possible. Even the Inland 
Sea is lined with forts and modern guns. They would 
never be guilty of the almost criminal folly of our gov- 

[44] 



JAPAN. 



ernment, in leaving Hawaii defenseless, after eight 
years of occupation, during which we have gone 
through with one war on the Pacific. It is the key 
to our Pacific littoral. As long as we hold it, no fleet 
save England's could attack us there. Held by a for- 
eign power as a base and coaling station, our western 
front would be defenseless. Today it is practically 
defenseless to a foreign fleet. A Japanese force could 
take it in an hour, and eat up all our warships on the 
Pacific in about the same space of time. In fact, 
the Japs now on the Islands, numbering 20,000 — 
all ex-soldiers — could take possession of this great 
strategic point almost without a struggle. Uncle Sam, 
the unready, always saves his money in time of peace, 
is always caught unprepared for war, and then must 
pour out blood and gold to make up for his unwise 
and foolish economy. If war ever comes with Japan 
she will seize the Philippines in two weeks, Hawaii 
in a month, and with our coast cities at her mercy 
dictate terms unless we prefer a long and desolating 
war, immense property loss, and thousands of lives, 
to recover the lost ground. 

We had two days ashore at Yokohama, and stayed 
[45] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

at the Grand Hotel, famous all over the East. There 
are other good hotels, such as the Club and the Ori- 
ental Palace, all on the Bund or harbor front, but the 
Grand is the largest and most comfortable. The view 
from our windows of the harbor, with shipping, sail- 
boats and sampans, the grim forts, the green hills 
beyond, the innumerable activities of the port, made 
a kaleidoscope of unfaihng interest. The Grand in 
a way is a club. Many of the foreign residents board 
there, and I met within its doors the representative 
men of the foreign interests. 

I spent most of my time for the two days in a rick- 
shaw, "for to admire and for to see." The standard 
conveyance of the East is the jinrikisha, colloquially 
rickshaw. Everyone uses them, and a horse convey- 
ance is as rare as an auto. I saw but two horse car- 
riages in Yokohama, a city of 326,000. All the haul- 
ing is done by handcarts, except some very heavy 
stuff. As a result, the streets are superlatively clean, 
and quiet beyond belief, — an illustration of what our 
cities will be when the auto banishes the horse to the 
country, where he belongs. 

I cannot say that I like the rickshaw for a long trip. 
It is tiring ; but for the city it is delightful, noiseless, 

[46] 



JAPAN 



easy, and cheap. Twenty-five sen an hour (12^ cents 
of our money) is the price ; two yen, or one dollar, by 
the day. The yen is worth 50 cents of our money, and 
is divided into 100 sen, — a very convenient currency 
when you get used to it. They tell me that about five 
years is the life of a rickshaw-man; as enlargement 
of the heart drives them into other occupations. 
They go from five to six miles an hour, never slacken 
except for a hill, and run with a peculiar gait, a high 
knee motion that seems wasteful of strength but com- 
municates no motion to the rickshaw. I had my 
picture taken in one and printed on a post card. This 
is one of the recognized things to do in Yokohama. 

Delia, a colored maid of one of the ladies of the ship, 
had her first ride in a rickshaw. She was enthusiastic 
over it, and told her mistress. 

"Miss Lucy, I done hiahed one of dem ripshaws 
and made dat nigger man haul me all ober town for 
fifty centses." 

''Why, Delia, they are not negroes, they are Jap- 
anese." 

''All same, dey looks like nigger men to me." 

A. is from " Jawjah," and she classes them the same 
way. 

[47] 



THEFAR EAST TODAY. 

I had expected to find Yokohama, the first and larg- 
est of the treaty ports, Europeanized. The fringe 
of it along the Bund is, but it is only a fringe. The 
moment you leave this fringe, perhaps two blocks 
wide, you plunge into old Japan, — narrow, tortuous 
streets, no sidewalks, every one walks in the road. 
One-story w^ooden houses with open fronts and the 
distinctive quaintness of Japan. 

It was a rainy day, and every one wore clogs, a 
wooden sandal with two supports transversely placed 
an inch high and kept on by a thong held between the 
first and second toes. No one wore stockings, and the 
Japanese foot is a thing to admire because it is the 
natural human foot. Not only has it never been dis- 
torted by a shoe, but it is scrupulously clean, polished 
and pedicured like a lady's hand with us. The 
rounded heel rosy with health and scrubbing, each toe 
perfect and slightly parted like the claws of a bird. 

Once in a while you see a man in European dress, 
never a woman, and they look absurd. The Japanese 
dress for men is the acme of comfort and freedom: 
short drawers, with the poorer class only a gee string, 
a kimono looped up when walking, and a pair of straw 
sandals; total cost, two yen or thereabouts. I, in 

[48] 



JAPAN 



my high collar, two shirts, a coat, shoes, and all the 
rest, envied every one I met. 

The dress for the women is ungraceful. The huge 
sash looped at the back spoils the figure. The tightly 
draped kimono hampers their movements, and be- 
sides it is considered ladylike to toe in and take step 
of about six inches, and so a Japanese maiden totter- 
ing along on her clogs toeing in with mincing steps 
is not lovely. 

In the country the women tuck up their kimonos, 
leave them open to the waist, and stride along like a 
man. 

The display of female anatomy on the country 
roads is a little startling at first, but one gets used to it. 

Japanese towns seem to be one big department 
store. None of the houses are over two stories. 
Every one seems to keep a shop and live over it or 
behind it. All the trades and occupations are car- 
ried on in plain view. The fronts are mere shutters 
that fold up and disappear. The household economy, 
the bedroom, the kitchen, the babies sprawling on 
the dirt floor, are all in evidence; while in the front 
the carpenter works or the tradesman chaffers with 
his customers. 

[49] 



THE'FAR EAST TODAY. 



Buying in Japan is a matter of much debate, always 
courteous and apparently unending. No one asks 
the price he expects to receive. It varies from two 
to four times its real worth. 

F. wanted a miniature tortoise-shell rickshaw. The 
owner asked five yen for it. The governor got it for 
her for one yen fifty. Another passenger priced a vase. 
It was four yen. He offered one yen for it, and got it. 

We stopped in a dry-goods store where F. wanted 
to buy a kimono. The floor was of dirt ; a platform a 
couple of feet from the ground covered with matting 
was the counter. There the merchant and his as- 
sistants, all barefooted, squatted and displayed their 
wares. Everything was clean, every one soft-voiced, 
courteous and smiling. The wrapping-paper was a 
work of art, the string a curiosity, and the smile and 
bow that went with the purchase inimitable. The 
Japanese bow is in a class by itself, a stiff inclination 
from the waist with a quick jerk backward. 

F. and I were riding through Old Yokohama, and 
the rickshaw men invited us to stop at a tea-house. 
I had my doubts as to the respectability of such places, 
but as F. was with me I felt safe. We stopped at 

[50" 



JAPAN 



a beautifully carved door, just inside of which was 
a platform covered with spotless matting. Three tiny- 
maidens prostrated themselves before us with many- 
genuflexions and ^^ohayos" (ohayo is Japanese for 
" How do you do? ")? ^-nd proceeded to induce our hon- 
orable feet into huge felt slippers so that our barbaric 
shoes might not mar the polished floor nor soil the 
painfully clean matting. We went up a little flight 
of steps and into a room like an exquisite toy house. 
The floor was of polished dark wood. The walls of 
sliding screens beautifully decorated, and even the 
little finger-holes to manipulate them elaborately 
carved inside. In the center was a table of carved 
cherry-wood a foot high. We sat on cushions, or 
squatted, rather, while they brought the tea. I never 
in my life felt so like a bull in a China shop. My 
bulky figure in American clothes seemed so big and 
clumsy and awkward, I was afraid to move for fear 
this toy house would fall down. I was a solecism, 
an impropriety. I felt as one does when he dreams of 
being in the street in his shirt. A lacquer tray was 
brought in with an earthen teapot with tea-leaves in 
it. A bowl of hot water, two tiny Satsuma cups, 
priceless in our country, and a plate of little cakes of 

[51] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

fantastic shapes with sugar de\ices on them. One 
of the to}' girls poured hot water on the tea-leaves, 
closed it tightly for a moment, and then poured out an 
infusion that perfumed the room. This was tea, 
strong, invigorating, and yet delicately flavored. 
Tea will not stand a sea voyage, however packed. It 
loses something of that ethereal flavor, and j^ou drink 
real tea nowhere but where it is gro^^Ti. The Russians 
know this, and bring all their tea overland. 

In the meanwhile, as the young ladies spoke no 
EngUsh we were trjdng to learn Japanese. Tea is 
''ocha." They laughed at oui pronunciation, and 
giggled at everj^thing, but such a soft little giggle — 
just a toy giggle, Uke ever}i;hing else. The girls were 
immensely interested m F.'s clothes and ornaments. 
They examined her rings and jewelrj^ felt the texture 
of her dress, and asked the name of everytliing. In- 
vestigated her shoes and stockings, and bowed and 
giggled over ever^^thing. Once the Doctor took two 
ladies to a tea-house and had the same performance. 
They examined ever\^thing. FuiaUy one of them threw 
one of the ladies' dress to her Imees, to see how far the 
embroider}^ went. Doubtless she would have gone 
into the lingerie, too, if the lady had not jumped up and 

[52] 



JAPAN 



left . Finally, I paid the bill and carefully removed my- 
self from the toy room without breaking anything, — 
had my slippers removed, and left. The last I saw 
the three little creatures were on all fours, bobbing and 
ducking and murmuring " Sayonara" — that's good-by ; 
and one of them who had evidently learned the phrase 
by heart repeated her only ^^Ingleesh'' : "Will you 
please to have the honorable kindness to come again? " 

Your first caller at a Yokohama hotel is the tailor, 
a half-dozen. He brings his samples, takes your meas- 
ure or the garment you wish copied, and in twenty- 
four hours you have it perfectly reproduced at a price 
that seems absurd. But you must be careful about 
the garment you want reproduced, for he wiU copy 
every detail. If there is a patch or rent sewed up 
you will find it exactly reproduced in the new garment. 
Their work is exquisite, and the materials hardly ob- 
tainable at home. 

F. got a skirt of sheer-grass linen beautifully made 
for less than the cost of making her American skirt. 
I bought some linen clothes, exact copies of my home 
clothes, for about the price of overalls in Kansas. 

If you want shoes or anything else you need not 
P3] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

leave your room. A boy comes with an assortment 

from which you choose. The way of the East, how 

curious it is ; and talk of conservatism, here you find 

the real article. The little verse at the head of this 

chapter is a favorite in the East : 

" A fool lies here 
Who tried to hustle the East." 

The Japanese and Chinese laborers are perhaps 
the most industrious in the world, the business men. 
the most leisurely. Business is a heart-breaking 
procrastination for Americans when they first come 
out here. They try to '^ hustle the East" when they 
first come out. If they stay they give it up, or else 
there's "a, tombstone white." What is the reason 
for this — conservatism? Primarily, religion. The 
ancestor-worship of both. I shall have occasion to 
refer to this later, but for the present pass it with the 
one remark that no other religion has endured so 
long, influenced vitally so many millions, or today 
holds undisputed sway over so many of the earth's 
inhabitants. It is the most vital fact about these two 
races, and it interposes an unsuperable bar to the 
adoption of Christianity and accounts for the utter 
failure of missionary work out here. 

[54] 



JAPAN 



The old way is the way. Superficially the Japanese 
are imitative. 

When their government and military system broke 
down in contact with Western civilization in 1868, 
they reformed both. They have adopted Occidental 
government, guns and ships. They buy our machin- 
ery and use it. But when the soldier in his khaki or 
the man-of-war's man in his white duck goes home he 
strips off his borrowed clothes and reverts to the 
kimono. The operative in the cotton mill, tending 
American looms, goes back to a house whose form, 
furnishing and decoration are older in type than Chris- 
tianity. On whose walls are his ancestral tablets 
with their daily offerings of food and flowers reminding 
him constantly of the Old Way, the way of the East. 

The ''awakening of Japan'' is on the surface, — 
material, superficial. Beneath it is the unassailable 
conservatism, racial, religious, profound, inexpugn- 
able. 

And so the Foreign Devils who come here and suc- 
ceed fall into the way of the East; life is leisurely, 
slow-going. 

There is always time for a drink and a smoke. 
Competitors will not seize the business meanwhile — 

[55] 



THj: FAR EAST TODAY. 

they are doing the same. It is not at all the maiia- 
na" of the Mexican. They are simply doing busi- 
ness in their own way, — deliberate, careful, thorough. 
They are so old, these people. They measure their 
time by cycles. Their written history began when we 
were naked savages. A year is nothing. 

An artist works ten years on a single tiny piece of 
Satsuma or Cloisonne. What of that? The result 
is perfection. In every house the ancestral tablets 
show a lineage older than kings can boast in the Oc- 
cident. 

''A thousand years is but a watch in the night." 
There is so much time. If Kamamura does not 
finish the vase or the carving, his son will. These 
ephemeral Western people that come and go with 
their upstart religions, and mushroom monarchies, 
their dynasties that rise and fall, their institutions 
that change and decay and disappear, — what are 
they to a people whose sovereign traces his lineage 
direct from the sun, whose religion is older than the 
sites of any of our cities, whose social fabric goes back 
to an antiquity so remote that the Deluge is news for 
an extra and the Fall of Man, Modern History? Mere 
ephemeridse, things of a day, creatures of an hour. 

[i56] 



JAPAN 



When the American RepubHc is but a name, when 
Macaulay's New-Zealander is sitting on London Bridge 
and viewing the ruins of St. Paul's, the way of the 
East will be the same. 

We left Yokohama Thursday morning, and, skirt- 
ing southern Japan, reached Kobe on the bay of that 
name Friday morning, and spent the day there. 

There is not much to see in Kobe. It is merely a 
great shipping point, but its situation is wonderfully 
beautiful. It lies in a crescent at the head of the bay 
backed by great broken wooded hills intensely green. 
Back of the town is one of the most beautiful water- 
falls in Japan, which we visited by rickshaw, dined 
at the Oriental, and went back to the ship in a sam- 
pan. Like the rickshaw, the sampan is peculiar to 
the East. It is of all sizes, but the type is very sharp 
forward, nearly flat-bottomed, and propelled by scull- 
ing. The oarsman stands erect in the stern, and with 
a wooden pin in the handle of the oar uses it exactly 
as a fish uses his tail. In rowing, the effort in re- 
covering is lost motion. There is no lost motion 
here. The man pushes and pulls, and every motion 
impels the boat. It is astonishing how fast one of 

[57] 



THEFAR EAST TODAY. 

these men will send a loaded sampan along. They 
are very seaworthy and stanch, and in them the Jap- 
anese fishermen ply their trade at fearful distances 
from the land. By the way, the waters of Japan 
swarm with fishermen, as fish is the principal diet of 
her millions, and these fishermen are a caste. Very 
low in the social scale, something like the Pariahs of 
India. 

Buddhism, which is hardly a religious force in Japan 
today, was at one time strong enough to secure the 
abolition of animal food, and fish takes its place. 

But with curious inconsistency the Buddhist who 
will not take animal life made the fishermen outcast 
because they violate the law of Buddha, but eats the 
fish the fisherman has killed. 

At Kobe we entered the wonderful Inland Sea of 
Japan, one of the most beautiful bodies of water in 
the world. It separates the southern islands from 
the northern group, and varies in width from places 
where we were out of sight of land to places where we 
could have thrown a stone to either shore. It has 
been compared to many other beautiful spots. The 
Swiss and Italian lakes are smaller, their hilltops 
covered with hoary castles or beautiful palaces, their 

[58] 



JAPAN. 



slopes clothed with vines and backed by mountains 
whose perennial snows lend a charm to an exquisite 
combination of foreground and perspective, unpar- 
alleled elsewhere. 

The hills of Japan are rugged, not high nor awe- 
inspiring; their slopes lack the sophisticated charm 
that cultivation has given to the Rhine, Maggiore, or 
the lakes of the Four Cantons. The human interest, 
the legend and story, the historical fabric that clothes 
every creek and hilltop, are wanting here. It is 
beautiful but uninteresting. Its hills and islands, 
its fishing villages and tiny farms, climbing the hills 
or hung by stone-wall terraces to apparently inac- 
cessible slopes, are marvels of patient industry, but 
they are not beautiful or interesting. It is a. danger- 
ous sea, full of rocks and islands, with swift and 
treacherous currents, and every sailor breathes freer 
when he is out of it. Our crew stood for hours by 
both anchors, ready to let go at a moment's notice, 
for there are places where a momentary stoppage 
of the engines would mean sure destruction unless 
the anchors should hold. 

Just out of Moji we passed the wreck of a 'Hall 
ship," a steamer gored by a rock and sunk when but 

[59] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

200 feet out of her course, and within a stone 's-tlirow 
of the shore. 

Just at dark we entered the Sea of Japan and passed 
within sight of the water where Togo destroyed the 
Russian fleet, and saw the sun set behind that island 
under which with marvelous skill he hid his ships 
until he was ready to pounce upon the Russians. 
We awoke at daybreak Sunday morning in the open- 
ing of Nagasaki Harbor. 

After inspection we moved up and anchored off the 
town. Everyone has heard of Nagasaki, as it is the 
chief naval station of the Islands and cut a great 
figure in the recent war. Besides, the principal coal 
mines of the islands are near here, and Nagasaki is 
the coaling station for nearly all lines on the Pacific. 
We coaled there, and the operation was the most in- 
teresting thing I have seen in the Islands. 

We moored in the midst of a whole fleet of coal 
barges, but there was no apparatus visible to lift the 
coal from the barges to the ship. *^ Watch," said 
the Governor; ''you will see something curious." 
As we swung into our moorings the crowd of barges 
moved into orderly array about us, stern to the ship, 
pointing outwardly, twelve on each side. This, which 

[60] 




COALING AT NAGASAKI. 



JAPAN. 



with any other people would have taken unlimited 
cursing and quarreling, was accomplished without an 
altercation, each helping the other with a push here, 
a drag on the hne there. The moment the stern of 
a barge touched the ship a man swarmed up a rope 
to the rail of the main deck. A board two feet wide 
and four feet long is handed to him, another joins 
him, and they swing this board like a painter's ladder 
with ropes tied to the rail just below the port-hole 
that is to receive the coal. Three feet below this 
another is hung, but this is wider and projects beyond 
the upper one. Another and another is strung, till 
the barges are reached, and then a stout bamboo is 
lashed to the outer corners of these steps — and there 
you are, a strong, steady flight of steps built in ten 
minutes without a nail. Still you wonder — the steps 
are too far apart to climb ; but almost as soon as the 
steps are finished men and women both swarm up and 
station themselves, two on each stage of the ladder. 
Baskets without handles are passed up from hand to 
hand till the man on the top step empties them into 
the bunker. It is like a bucket brigade at a fire, 
only swifter and more perfect than any bucket bri- 
gade you ever saw. Each knows just exactly what 

[61] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

to do, and each does it. Even the children work, 
picking up lumps too big for the shovels. The opening 
of the largest bunker is on the bridge deck, twenty- 
five feet above the water, and half a dozen barges 
unload into that. I counted the baskets going up 
and they averaged thirty to the minute, half a bushel 
dumped every two seconds, not a motion wasted, not 
a false move, the perfection of physical effort, women 
and men alike. 

It seems primitive and absurd in these days of 
steam, but the engineer tells me that coaling is quicker 
and cheaper here than in any other port in the world. 
Hand labor here is cheaper than steam, and the '' Nip- 
pon" took in 1800 tons of coal in seven hours. It 
was a wonderful sight, the entire side of the ship 
covered with them, a stream of baskets ascending 
from each barge, never hastening but never pausing. 
The men are paid 35 cents a day, our money, the 
women ten, — the same disproportion the world over, 
— and the women do as much as the men ; and such 
good-nature, such jokes and laughter, it sounds like 
a merry-making, and never a basket dropped or a 
lump lost. 

Nagasaki clings to a range of hills rising from a beau- 
[62] 



JAPAN 



tiful land-locked harbor. We took rickshaws, two 
men to each, and went over the hills to Mogi, a pic- 
turesque fishing village on the other side of the island. 
It is about seven miles over the mountain by a mag- 
nificent road, and I think the most interesting ride 
I ever took. Going up, one man pulls and the other 
pauses; going down, the man behind holds back 
with the rope. 

The road winds up and up through rice-fields clean 
to the top. Here is Japanese agriculture at its best. 
The fields are tiny, some of them not over 10x30 feet. 
In some of them they were plowing with a bullock 
and a plow hke the first one Abel used. In others 
they were cutting out last year's roots with a kind of 
mattock, and in others the rice was just up. There 
were a few patches of wheat and many gardens. 

The rice-fields are irrigated from a little mountain 
stream that, rising far up in the hills, is led from field 
to field, dropping from one to another by stone con- 
duits centuries old, not a drop wasted. We saw two 
horses on the road drawing low-wheel wagons, a few 
bullocks with loads on their backs, and countless men 
and women carrying baskets swung from a pole over 
their shoulder, the women half-naked, striding along 

[63] 



THE. FAR EAST TODAY. 

under burdens that would stagger an ordinary man. 
All cheerful, friendly, and courteous. 

Their little huts perched on the hillside, with flow- 
ers all about, are models of neatness ; surely they are 
a wonderful people, making the most of nothing, 
doing their work and living on less than a family in 
America wastes. 

The road descends to Mogi through a magnificent 
bamboo forest, to my mind one of the most graceful 
trees in the world. 

Everywhere greenness and cleanliness, murmuring 
brooks and little waterfalls, purple hills with mist- 
wreaths all about them, and the blue sea beyond, — 
a wonderful sight, with interest in every turn of the 
road. 

We left Nagasaki for Manila Sunday night ; sailed 
down past the east coast of Formosa, and Tuesday 
night ran into a typhoon. Tuesday was a tropical 
day. The little breeze there was was behind us, and 
it was damp, sticky and disagreeable on deck and in- 
tolerable below. The air was murky, with frequent 
downpours of rain and charged with electricity. 
Everyone was cross and peevish, and when at five 

[64] 



JAPAN 



o'clock the wind suddenly came out of the west fresh 
and strong it was a heavenly rehef ; but the old-timers 
looked grave. 

The barometer was falling fast, and when at dark 
Capt. Filmer suddenly turned and pointing north- 
easterly began steaming dead slow but squarely away 
from Manila, we knew there was trouble ^ coming. 
The typhoon is peculiar to these waters, and is the 
most dreaded storm the sailor knows. It is a vast 
tornado from five to six hundred miles across, rotary, 
of course; its vortex a dead calm with terrific seas, 
and its outer fringe always carries a heavy rain and 
electric disturbance, the whole body of the storm 
moving slowly, usually from southwest to northeast. 

The aim of sailors is to dodge them or keep as near 
the outer edge as possible. The captain judged that 
the main storm was to the south of us and moving off 
into the Pacific. Besides, we were approaching the 
strait between Formosa and Luzon, and he wanted 
more searoom. Given that and good engines and 
there is not so much danger. But even a momentary 
breakdown for the engines is fatal. By ten o'clock 
we were fairly into it. There was an almost continu- 
ous glare of lightning that showed a troubled, lumpy 

[652 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

sea full of tossing white-caps. The wind blew first 
from one quarter and then another, almost boxing 
the compass, and sometimes cool and sometimes as 
hot as a furnace. The ship did not roll much, and I 
went to sleep. I was awakened by a terrific slatting 
and banging overhead, where the sailors were taking 
down the awnings. A little while later I was awak- 
ened again, by my table going over with a crash. 
The wind had ceased and just then men rushed by 
our cabin, closing the heavy shutters. They worked 
with feverish haste, calling to each other in the pitchy 
darkness. The engines were moving so slowly they 
could not be felt, but the ship was rolling violently 
and the wind came again. This was the typhoon, and 
the Lord deliver me from another. All night the 
wind shrieked and hovvded and the spray battered 
the front of our cabin and flew hissing past our win- 
dows. I could see nothing, hear nothing but the roar 
of the wind, the hammering of the waves; and the 
tremendous concert finally lulled me to sleep. 

Day gave us a magnificent sight of angry clouds 
and rushing seas, a welter of green and white foam. 
The wind was so terrific that it really kept the sea 
down temporarily: whenever a wave raised itself 

[66] 



JAPAN. 



higher than the others it was torn to foam and the 
air was full of spray and flying spume. It was im- 
possible to face it except from shelter. By night the 
wind had moderated and the typhoon turned south- 
ward. That night the sea got up in earnest, and the 
rolling and the pitching were frightful. Twice I was 
pitched out of my sofa bed onto the floor. In the 
night one of the boats overhead broke its lashings 
where it was swung from the davits and it seemed as 
though the world was coming to an end. After a 
long time I went to sleep, and about seven o'clock 
was awakened by a terrific crash forward. The steer- 
age galley smoke-stack and three of the ventilators 
had carried away and were battering around the deck. 
The ship stopped, and a crowd of sailors swarmed, out 
and worked desperately to close the openings. 

We steamed slow for a while, and then stopped. 
''You'll see some fun now," said one of the officers to 
me; 'Hhe old man is tired of loafing and he is going 
to drive her." The men swarmed forward again, and 
removed the remaining ventilators on the forward 
deck, took down everything removable and lashed and 
relashed everything else; and then we started full 
speed ahead. 

[67] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

That was a day to be remembered; the wind had 
gone down and the sea come up. As a matter of fact, 
two typhoons had passed over these waters a day 
apart; we missed the second by a few miles, but 
crossed its track. The effect of the two was a ter- 
rific sea, not the long rollers of the Atlantic, but 
broken tumuli, great hills of water heaped and tossing 
and breaking, rising and disappearing. When two 
would strike each other there would be a perfect geyser 
of foam spouting a hundred feet in the air, and through 
this hellish sea the ''Nippon" plunged and bucked 
full steam ahead. Sometimes when a sea would strike 
her bow, she would stagger and stop like a man struck 
in the face, and then the big screws would drive her 
into it again. The ''Nippon" is very sharp forward, 
built to slip through the water with a minimum of 
force ; sometimes she would cut clear through one of 
these hills of water and it would rush over her bows 
and strike the deck with a noise like thunder and go 
pouring aft waist-deep. Sometimes in its downward 
descent the sheer of her bows would flatten the 
mountain of water to spray. That was a sight to see, 
a perfect cloud of white foam rising fifty feet in the 
air and drenching the ship clear to the crows'-nest. 

[68] 



JAPAN 



All day the lower decks were awash and the upper 
swept with salt spray. It seemed a mhacle that this 
big lump of a ship, ten thousand tons weight, could be 
tossed about like a cork, and it seemed another mir- 
acle that she could be driven through such sea. 

Well, I have seen one storm at sea. I have always 
wanted to, and am satisfied. This was no gale — it 
was the best effort of the storm king. The biggest 
thing old Boreas can do. 

In November, 1905, a typhoon in Manila blew 110 
miles an hour. The typhoon in Hong Kong last Sep- 
tember beached every ship in the harbor, swept it 
clear, killed thousands of people, and destroyed prop- 
erty by the million dollars. To show the force of it, 
a big German ship had both anchors out and was 
steaming full speed against the storm to relieve the 
strain on them. The storm snapped her cables and 
blew her high and dry. 

A French man-of-war and two torpedo-boats and 
innumerable other craft were sunk or blown ashore. 

The typhoon season lasts from June till November, 
and makes these the most perilous waters in the world. 

We may meet another before we leave the China 
Sea, but we hope not. 

[69] 



MANILA. 

I shall be veiy loquacious concerning Manila, 
doubtless prosy ; there is so much to say, so much to 
learn and unlearn. 

Since the war was over, there has been a Great 
Silence over these Islands; we hear nothing, know 
nothing. Now and then a small news item leaks out 
some ray of light tln'ough the darkness, but it may be 
safely generalized that the average American knows 
more of Paris and the Congo than he does of these, 
our Islands. 

So I hope to be excused if I write at length about the 
facts as I found them. 

\Yell, the first and biggest fact about the Islands is 
William H. Taft. Out here his figure, which to us at 
home is ver\^ vague, little knowTi, — ^less so, perhaps, 
than any other man in public life, — looms very large, 
almost gigantic, very familiar; a clear, distinct sil- 
houette of the man who is boimd to be a great figure 
in American life. The Island Government is Taft ; 
whatever there is of good or iU in the Anrerican oc- 

[70] 



f. 



I 



IF 



I 



( 



«: 



i<^ 




.^' 



ir- If- 



^t.:^ 



i. ' 



M A^N I L A . 



cupation is Taft. His big thumb is on these islands. 
His word is law; his will is fiat; he is the be- 
ginning and the end. When the waters and the 
earth were parted and the world that was without 
form and void was created out here, Taft was It. 
He was the military, then the civil, Governor, 
and now, as Secretary of War, is more omnipotent 
than ever. Roosevelt leaves it all to him. He ap- 
points and discharges Governors and Councils ; noth- 
ing is done unless he says, "Let it be so." The pres- 
ent Governor, Smith, was a rather small California 
lawyer, a weak man who refers everything to Taft, 
a mere figurehead. He cannot appoint a clerk with- 
out Taft's "0. K." Like many strong men, Taft 
likes not strong men under him. Ide and Wright, 
next to Taft the strongest Governors we have had 
here, opposed Taft and lost their heads. 

So Taft is the Philippine Government ; but mark 
you, the impulse of that Governmicnt, the ideal to 
which it works, comes not from Taft, but from a great 
American who is in his grave,— WiUiam McKinley. 

McKinley, who was one of the clearest-headed 
pohticians we ever had in America when he dealt 
with the Caucasian mind, but knew nothing of the 

[71] 



THE, FAR EAST TODAY. 

Asiatic, conceived a lofty idea of our mission in the 
Orient. We were to take the downtrodden Fihpino 
by the hand, raise him up, guide his tottering foot- 
steps in the path of self-government, and finally erect 
a Filipino Republic. And so Taft, following this 
altruistic concept, has been running a kindergarten 
to teach the Filipinos how to stand alone and how to 
govern themselves; and his mistakes, which are not 
few, are mostly traceable to this fundamental racial 
mistake. For, let me say at the outset, and set it 
down as a fact, indisputable and not to be questioned, 
that the Filipino Republic is about as far off as the 
moon, and just about as attainable. 

In the first place, there has never been a working 
republic, a self-governing, autonomous race within 
the tropics, in all the history of the world. The qual- 
ities that make for self-government, cool blood, self- 
control, willingness to yield to the majority, do not 
exist along the line. They are the products of a 
colder clime, more austere conditions. Our Anglo- 
Saxon race, with all these qualities, was at school for 
2000 years before we attained self-government. Have 
we attained it? After all, it is yet an experiment 
with us, and our schooling goes on from day to day. 

[72] 



MANILA 



In short, a republic is temperamental. It is not a 
question of intelligence, but of character. A charac- 
ter that the Filipinos wholly lack, likely must ever 
lack. Taft knows it now. In his later pronounce- 
ments he has thrown cold water on Filipino independ- 
ence, backed clean away from his earlier promises 
and hopes held out to them, and as a result, is to-day 
unpopular with the Filipinos. They are awaiting 
his visit in September with eagerness. He will have 
to declare himself, and he can say but one thing, 
and that is, that they must wait, wait, till we are 
ready. He has already said that independence can- 
not come with this generation, that it will take time 
and education ; but it will take more than education, 
it will take a re-formation of the Filipino character. 
We did not learn self-government out of books, nor 
will they. 

And this leads me to say something about the Fil- 
ipino. I am not speaking from personal knowledge 
alone, but from the testimony of those who know, 
men who have been in the Far East for a generation, 
men of all nationalities, men who know all the races 
of the Pacific intimately, and they all agree that our 
little brown brother is the worst of the lot. They 

[73] 



TH.E FAR EAST TODAY. 

say that he is idle, hopelessly thriftless, a liar, treach- 
erous, dishonest, and mostly vicious. He will work 
only when compelled to, he will not save nor try to 
get ahead. He has no regard for his word, no con- 
science and less morality. In short, he is a '^bad 
lot." There are two exceptions, the most savage 
tribes as we reckon savages, — the Moros and the 
Igorrotes. From all accounts they are industrious, 
thrifty and honorable ; and the Vizcayans and Taga- 
logs, who are the most civihzed and most intelligent 
of the lot, hate them accordingly. 

I presume this statement will be disputed, and 
there are many distinguished exceptions to the rule 
herein laid down, Filipinos of high character; but 
I believe that any army officer, any business man, 
who has had to do with them, and particularly any 
employer of labor in the Islands, will confirm this 
statement. 

So here is the raw material we have to deal with, 
and it is surely an uphill job. They will hold an elec- 
tion in September for members of the first Legislative 
Assembly for the Islands. It Vvdll be a Icvrer house, 
the Governor and Council constituting the upper. 
There are several parties contesting the seats, but 

[74] 



MANILA 



they center about two groups, the Independists, who 
favor immediate independence, and the Progressists, 
who are pro-American and advocate waiting and 
trusting the Americans. The former are promising 
the voters that if they win and show that they want 
immediate independence, the Americans will grant 
independence not later than October. I think the 
Independists will win and have a large majority. 
About that time Taft will arrive and something will 
be done. 

The great majority of them care nothing about the 
matter. Out of nearly 19,000 qualified voters in 
Manila, only 6000 registered. The whole movement 
is confined to a handful of agitators who want ofhce, 
who have a little schooling and can ^^ orate." The 
average Islander, with his nipa shack, a few acres to 
till and a carabao, is content to be governed anyhow 
if no wrong is done him. Bear in mind that the God 
of the Far East is a God of Justice, not a God of Love 
and Mercy. They do not expect mercy. Mercy is to 
them a sign of weakness, and they despise the mercy- 
monger as they hate injustice. If we give them jus- 
tice — and that they never had from the Spanish — they 
will be content. 

[75] 



THE'FAR EAST TODAY. 

It is nearly always some wrong, some injustice, 
real or fancied, that drives them to the '^ Bosky" 
and makes ladrones of them. One of them is cheated 
in a trade or the presidente of a town injm-es him in 
some way. He does not go to court, he has no faith 
in the law. He gathers his friends and takes to the 
bush to get even. Generally he comes back and burns 
the town, and kills as many of the inhabitants as he 
can lay hands on, or catches the offending presidente, 
and, in his simple childish way, fills him with kerosene 
and sets fire to it. 

The constabulary must go out in the jungle and 
catch him and his friends, and those that are left after 
the fight are punished. Generally it will be found 
that they had some grievance and turned outlaw to 
get even. We have established courts everywhere, 
and our judges are high-class men. They are paid 
liberal salaries ; the lov/est receive $5000 gold a year, 
and very gradually they are teaching the Filipino 
that he can get justice, get it surely, quickly and 
cheaply; and so, very slowly, confidence in the law, 
in the justice of the Americans, is gaining, and these 
■petty insurrections are growing fewer. 

One of the most prolific sources of trouble is the 
[76] 



MANILA 



land question. The friars claim title to most of the 
good land in Luzon. Taft bought their claims for 
S7,000,000 gold, with the idea of selling it to the 
Filipinos. The friars had, at best, a very shadowy 
title, and in most cases we find a Filipino in posses- 
sion who claims to own it. Generally he has no more 
than a squatter's title, but he has occupied it, per- 
haps for two or three generations, cleared it, diked it 
for rice, and thinks it his. He refuses to pay for it, 
law suits follow, irritating, expensive, and full of ill- 
feeling for the Government. 

And this leads me to one of the severest criticisms 
against Taft in the Islands. They say that the Cath- 
olic Church controls him. That the seven millions 
was a gift to placate the church. There is an insist- 
ent rumor that he has reopened the matter of the 
church's claim for destruction of churches during the 
war, a claim rejected once, and that the claim of 
some four million dollars will be paid. The rumor is 
persistent, you hear it everywhere, and everyone be- 
lieves it, but it is not '^ official." ''They say" that it 
is to be done for political effect at home, to secure 
Catholic support. I do not believe the claim will be 
paid, and if it is, it will be for other reasons. They 

[77] 



THE-FAREAST TODAY. 

overlook the fact that the church is the biggest factor 
the Government has to deal with in these Islands. It 
has had three hundred years of undisputed power, so 
long that the people, as well as the church itself, have 
come to regard its interference in Government affairs, 
its dictation of policies and appointments, as not only 
natural but right. It is very rich, very powerful 
and very arrogant. An open breach with it would 
make our position in the Islands even more difficult 
than it now is. And Taft temporizes with it, yields 
where he must, but avoids any ground of quarrel 
where possible. These critics also ignore how greatly 
the Americans have curtailed the former powers of 
the church. The power of divorce has been given 
to our courts, civil marriages are legalized, and so the 
control of the family relation, exclusively in the church 
till now, has been taken from it. But above all, 
education has been wholly secularized, and the free 
schools of the Islands will speedily rob the church 
of those lay powers that it has enjoyed through these 
instrumentalities. It takes the long look ahead, pa- 
tient waiting for time to do its work. The critics are 
too hasty ; they desire to move too fast. 

Of course it is aggravating to know, and it is a fact, 
[78] 



MANILA 



that no man can hold a job if the Church opposes 
him. Icle defied the Chmxh and lost his job. Wright 
fell out with the Church and lost his. While I was 
there a man selected for the Council, backed by every 
other influence in the Islands, eminently fit, was 
finally turned down because the Church protested. 

But I beheve it is the right pohcy for the present, 
however much it galls and irritates Americans. 

A v/ord as to Ide and Yv^right. The former is from 
Vermont, was some years ago Commissioner in Sa- 
moa under the tripartite government there of Eng- 
land, Germany, and the United States. He was a 
member of the Council here, and for a brief period. 
Governor. He is generahy thought here to be the 
ablest American who v^^as ever in the service. He 
compiled the code under which the Islands are nov\^ 
governed, and it stamps him as one of the greatest 
lawyers now alive. It is as nearly perfect as lav/ can 
be. He took the best of the civil law that the Span- 
ish used, together v/ith the best of the common law, 
and for the code of procedure took the best from the 
code States, such as Ohio and Cahfornia. The re- 
sult is a model: clear, certain, compendious, written 
in beautiful Enghsh, it furnishes the simplest, most 

[79] 



THEFAR EAST TODAY. 

inexpensive and most exact administration of justice 
that I know of anywhere. There is no jury trial, 
but the right of appeal is universal, simple, and 
cheap. 

While I was in Manila there was a murder trial 
that involved very nearly the same facts as the Thaw 
case. A man killed the ''destroyer of his home.'' 
It was shown that the accused had been intimate 
with his wife before marriage ; that she had been irl- 
timate with other men, and that he knew it when he 
married her. There was no mawkish sentiment in 
the trial, no jury to weep and snivel and follow their 
emotions, — just a cold-blooded examination of the 
facts, that occupied two days, cost about three hun- 
dred dollars to the Government, and ended in a life 
sentence for the murder. 

Ide fell out with Taft over expenditures. Taft 
wanted to do things, to spend money regardless of 
whether they had it or not. Ide insisted on keeping 
within the revenues. There was constant bickering 
between them, and v/hen Taft ordered the building 
of the Benguet road there was almost an open quarrel. 
This road, by the way, comes as near being a scandal 
as anything we have done there, and furnishes Taft's 

[80] 




SHINTO TEMPLE, NIKKO. 



MANILA 



critics with whole chapters of abuse. It runs from 
Dagupan, the northern terminus of the railroad, to 
Bagayo, the present capital of Benguet (the country 
of the Iggarotes), and also the summer capital of the 
Islands. It is an automobile road, or wagon-road, 
sixty miles in length, and cost over two millions gold 
to build and two hundred thousand gold a year to 
maintain. Where the money went is a mystery, as 
thirty-five miles of it is through a level country, 
merely macadamized. Twenty-five miles of it is 
in the mountains, a stupendous task, through some 
of the grandest scenery in the world. Bagayo, the 
capital, is 5200 feet above the sea, a healthful moun- 
tain climate where fires are needed every night, but 
its population is about 300 and the road at present 
does not benefit to exceed 500 people in the Islands. 
A few rich or high-salaried Americans have summer 
homes there, and during the hot months of March, 
April and May the Government sits there, — that is 
all. 

So, say the critics, Taft has spent four million 
pesos and imposed an annual burden on the Islands 
of four hundred thousand pesos to benefit a handful 
of rich people. But Taft was thinking'^of the future. 

[81] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

He intended to establish there a brigade post and 
hospital. To so move our troops as to give each com- 
mand a stay in that high altitude, to recuperate and 
regain its health. A sick soldier is of as little account 
as a dead soldier, and more expensive. There, should 
be a great hospital or sanatorium. Here our military 
and civil servants, debilitated by the lowlands, should 
come to regain health and strength. It was to be for 
the Philippines what Simla is to India; but at pres- 
ent there is nothing but the road over which few 
travel, a scandal-breeder, and the immediate cause of 
a breach between the two ablest men the Islands have 
had, Taft and Ide, a breach that never healed and 
cost Ide his job. 

Wright was another able man, but too strong, too 
obstinate, to work with Taft. 

The question of taxation in the Philippines is a hard 
one, and Wright broke his shins over it. The Islands 
are more heavily taxed today than they ever were 
under the Spanish. It sounds queer, doesn't it? — 
but it is true. We have retained every tax the Span- 
ish had and imposed many others. We have reduced 
the poll tax, but we have added a very heavy internal 
revenue tax, including stamps on all legal papers, 

[82] 



MANILA 



and a land tax, a thing unheard of before. The land 
tax was perforce suspended for a year because all the 
land in the Islands was being sold for taxes, and its 
continuance would have precipitated another in- 
surrection, but the tax on tobacco and spirits was 
Wright's hobby. Among the native members of the 
Council were the proprietor of the great Germinal 
tobacco factory and a large distiller. They fought 
the tax bitterly ; Wright prevailed and got his tax, 
but they got his scalp. He was let down easy by 
being sent as Minister to Japan, from which he has 
just been recalled after a brief service. Exit Wright, 
exit Ide, and Taft holds the center of the stage. 

One of the first question every American asked me 
was, "Is it true that Taft will get the Republican 
nomination?" "It looks that way now." "But 
why?" "Left to him by the last will and testament 
of Theodore Roosevelt." That is the only answer I 
could make, for without the overwhelming influence 
of the President, Taft would not be a presidential 
possibility, and yet I believe him to be the biggest 
man in the bunch, probably the best man for the job, 
but I do not beHeve he has any strong personal hold 
on the American people. If he were running here in 

[83] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

the Islands he would not get five per cent of the 
American votes outside of his personal appointees, 
nor would he now get ten per cent of the native vote. 
The Americans hate him because he has constantly 
and consistently adhered to his policy of the ''Phil- 
ippines for the Filipinos," and no American can get 
a job here if there is a Filipino at all competent to 
fill it. He has lost the confidence of the Filipinos 
because they took his vague assurances of independ- 
ence for a promise, a promise of early fulfillment, 
and when on his last trip he bade them wait, they 
were furious. They accused him of bad faith, of 
treachery, and when he comes again in September 
every word and look will be watched and weighed. 
Taft's is a personality that pecuharly impresses the 
Asiatic mind. He is the embodiment of physical 
and mental power. He makes other men around him 
look like thirty cents. He is firm, but gracious and 
kindly. He is impulsive, emotional, but back of it 
is a big, well-poised, judicial mind. He is suave, 
politic, so much so that his enemies say he is "two- 
faced," and for a while the Filipinos looked upon him 
as a saint and prayers were offered for ''Santo Taft." 
He was the best man we could have had there at the 

[84] 



MANILA 



start, and his mistakes have been mainly those of a 
mistaken policy, a policy that must be abandoned 
if these Islands are ever to thrive. 

The threat of a Filipino Republic keeps capital out, 
and capital is needed to develop the enormous resources 
that nature has heaped up here. No man with money 
will place it at the mercy of a native government, and 
as a result, mountains, rich in gold, silver, copper, 
iron and coal, keep their treasures. Lands that 
would produce enormously of rice, sugar, and hemp 
and tobacco are untilled. Great forests of the finest of 
hardwoods like mahogany and nara, are untouched. 
Japan, with a tithe of these Islands' tillable land and 
resources, supports forty millions of people. Java, 
a mere speck, has thirty millions, and yields an enor- 
mous revenue to Holland. If when we took these 
Islands we had been wise and honest with ourselves, 
if we had said to the world, '^We hold these Islands 
and we shall always hold them, hold them by the best 
title in the world, the title of the sword, that title by 
which nine-tenths of the earth's surface is held; we 
will give the natives justice, and such measure of 
local government as they show themselves fit for, but 
the flag shall never come down," — if we had given 

[85] 



THE -FAR EAST TODAY. 

that assurance, capital would have flowed in here, 
and this magnificent land would be on the top wave 
of prosperity. Sooner or later we shall have to do 
it. The balance of power in the Far East, as well as 
the interests of the Islands, will force us to. 

True, there is some capital coming. The Dagupan 
Railroad is rebuilding, but the Government guar- 
antees the four-per-cent bonds they are issuing. A 
magnificent street railway system has been built for 
Manila, but the Government guarantees its bonds, 
otherwise these things would not be done. 

Private capital to invest in sugar, hemp and to- 
bacco there is none. Interest rates are enormous, 
twelve per cent on land and twenty-four per cent on 
personal security. ''Business is very dull" you hear 
everywhere, and it will not be better till we assure the 
world that capital will be protected and not delivered 
over to a tropical repubhc. 

Taft's friends say that he does not want to be Pres- 
ident; that he has only consented to be a candidate 
because of pressure from within and without, from his 
family and his friends. He is a poor man, as wealth 
goes in America. His father left a \ery small com- 
petence, and Taft has been in public employ for over 

[86] 



MANILA 



twenty years on the meager salary we pay our public 
men, and has saved little or nothing. One reason 
that he was loath to leave the Islands was, that out of 
the salary of Governor-General, twenty-five thousand, 
gold, he could save something, while, as Secretary of 
War, he could not. 

Possibly there is too much Taft in this, but you 
cannot escape him out here. His name is on every- 
one's tongue. With one foot in Cuba and one in the 
Philippines, his shadow falls athwart two oceans and 
his personality dominates the destinies of millions. 
He is very big, very human, and very interesting. 

We passed Corregidor about nine o'clock, and of 
course had the proper thrill when we sighted Cavite. 
How far away it seems now, that battle, and yet it 
is only nine years since the world awoke to the fact 
that there was an American Navy, and we to the fact 
that we are a World Power. 

But of all the surprises the East has given us, 
Manila is the greatest. '^The cleanest, prettiest city 
in the Orient," that is the verdict of the Far East. 
The wide, shallow harbor has been protected by a 
breakwater, dredged till it will carry any ship that 

[87] 



THEFAR EAST TODAY. 

floats. A great system of docks is nearly completed 
and land for warehouses filled in, and within two years 
Manila will have the finest port in the Orient. This 
is all American. Yes! we tax them, but we spend the 
money honestly and wisely. And then Manila! A 
launch takes us up the Pasig, filled with traffic, bor- 
dered with business from all the winds that blow, to a 
stone quay, and we get our first glimpse of the old 
'^ walled city." Built in the days of smooth-bores, 
it must have been very strong, with a wide moat and 
scarp and counterscarp, angle and bastion, but the 
wall's only use now is to furnish a historical setting 
and background for a city transplanted from the 
Iberian Peninsula. Narrow streets, tall stone houses, 
built to resist ^^el tremblor," grated windows and 
projecting balconies that suggest dark-eyed senoritas 
and waving fans, noisy cobblestone pavements and 
two-foot sidewalks, all old but clean, miraculously 
clean. This is where the American comes in. Not 
a stench, not a speck, no rubbish, no garbage-heaps, no 
open sewers. Not a city in America has as clean 
streets as Manila. None is better policed, none more 
sanitary. In the six months ending July 1st, there 
has not been a single case of epidemic disease in the 

[88] 



MANILA. 



town. An unparalleled, an unheard-of thing, it 
breaks all records, not only in Manila, but in the 
Orient. No other city in Asia can equal it. The 
bubonic plague is epidemic now in Hong Kong and 
Shanghai. They have it in Yokohama and Nagasaki. 
Cholera and smallpox are always at work in the Far 
East. Manila alone is free, clean and healthy. That 
is American sanitation. Yes! we tax them, but we 
give them something for their money, and they are 
beginning to realize it, and no one knows what a task 
it has been, but those who have done it. To the 
Filipino filth and squalor are a natural environment. 
Left to himself, his surroundings are unspeakable. 
But the American health officer hustles him and har- 
ries him and makes him clean up, and the strange 
terrible tropical diseases that ran their course un- 
checked and slew their thousands have moved over 
to Hong Kong and Shanghai, and the native wonders 
at the ways of these Americans, who interfere with 
the will of God and do it successfully. But it is much 
trouble to be so clean, and after all, what is the use? 
One dies when God wills, if not of the plague, then of 
something else. When your time comes — pouf ! you 
are gone and that is the end, and this cleanness is 

[89] 



THE. FAR EAST TODAY. 

much trouble. '^Mother of God! how crazy these 

big Americans are." 

Well! they are clean for once, and we have paid 

toll for it in heroic physicians who have sacrificed 

their lives for the sanitation of this filthy old Spanish 

town. Personally, I do not think our brown brother 

is worth it. I do not think the Islands are worth the 

life of one American, but we are here somehow, we 

have shouldered the ''White Man's Burden" and we 

cannot in honor lay it down. By the way, speaking 

of our brown brother, here is a favorite song among the 

Americans here : 

"He may be a brother of William H. Taft, 
But he ain't no brother of mine." 

Of all the races of the Pacific, I think the Filipinos 
are the least attractive. They are ugly — men, women 
and children. Their dress is a caricature. They 
are slouchy, unkempt, slovenly. Even the Mestizos, 
who have an infusion of foreign blood, are no great 
improvement on the native stock. 

Of course at five o'clock we took a carriage and 
drove to the Lunetta to see and be seen. There the 
band plays and there everyone, ''as is anyone," goes 
and drives around and around its oval roadway for 

[90] 



t^2; 



I 




MANILA 



an hour. The band is good, its director an American 
negro, and the scene is a gay one. Everyone wears 
white, and everyone, official and unofficial, is there in 
his best. 

Such turnouts! American horses cannot live here. 
Occasionally an imported Australian horse survives, 
but seldom. So the horseflesh is Filipino ponies and 
the carriages calesas or victorias. The calesa is a 
two-wheeled affair, drawn by one horse with the 
driver seated over the horse's tail, and it bumps and 
jiggles in the most absurd fashion; and by the way, 
you pay New York prices for its hire. The victoria 
has two horses with a driver in livery, all but his feet, 
which are bare. 

The draught animal of the Islands is the carabao 
or water-buffalo, an ungainly beast with wide re- 
treating horns, an ugly temper, and a gait of about a 
mile an hour. He must be allowed to get in water 
at regular intervals or he goes crazy, and he hates the 
American. Four of them once stampeded a regiment 
of regular infantry, and one of them will make a 
whole company take to the trees any time. 

Well! the Lunetta parade is over and we drive 
back to a dinner at the Delmonico, a good dinner in a 

[91] 



T H E F A R EAST TODAY. 

hotel that was formerly the 'Tasa" of an old Spanish 
family, with a wide cool patio, a great interior court, 
and rooms that are mainly out of doors. 

We went shopping in the evening. All the shop- 
keepers are Chinese, for the Filipino has no notion of 
trade, and finds it hard to add two and two. Every- 
one smokes long black cigars all the time save when 
he is asleep. The clerk that waited on F. had on a 
pair of drawers, that was all, and puffed a big black 
cigar in her face. The shops are small, and not much 
temptation to buy. American goods are very high, 
and few of the native stuffs attractive. One of the 
complaints against the American occupation is the 
increased cost of living, — trebled, some say; others, 
quadrupled. Rents are high; wages have advanced 
three-fold with no improvement in the quality of 
labor. Where a common laborer formerly received 
50 cents a day Mexican, that is 25 cents gold, he now 
gets $1.50 Mexican. Instead of working six days in 
the week as he formerly did, he now works two, loafs 
and fights chickens the rest of the time. Every 
grown Filipino owns one or more gamecocks, and the 
only poultry you get on the table is game chickens, 
too old or too cowardly to fight. 

[92] 



MANILA. 



We went up the Pasig in a launch, where the mon- 
keys chattered at us from strange tropical foliage, and 
the ylang-ylang burdened the air with its heavy per- 
fume, the most lasting and penetrating of all odors. 

We went out to Fort McKinley, five miles from 
town, where 4000 of our soldiers rust in idleness, and 
saw the long street of nipa shacks that leads to it, a 
Filipino variant of the approach to every military 
post the world over, where the boys dope themselves 
with vino and beget half-breeds. 

Mainly I visited with the American expatriates, a 
royal bunch of fellows. 

Major Bishop, of Salina, who came with the Twen- 
tieth Kansas and has seen more fighting than any 
man in the Islands (that is his record), is a lawyer 
here with a big practice, likes it, and so do his family. 

Captain Haussman, of Leavenworth, is another 
lawyer in a large v/ay of business. There are thirty 
or forty American lawyers in Manila, all apparently 
doing well, and they like it. They defend the climate, 
and the Lord knows it needs able counsel for the de- 
fense. It is not so hot, but the humidity is awful, 
it has been known to rain 23 inches in 24 hours. The 
annual precipitation often runs to 110 inches. In 

[93] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

1904 it rained without stopping a moment for 17 
days. Manila was a lake ; the water in the streets 
was from three to five feet deep. 

The hot season is from March to June; then the 
rains set in for three months. The fall and winter 
are delightful. It is not unhealthful if one lives prop- 
erly, but the continuous heat is debilitating. 

Most Americans like Manila, but a significant com- 
mentary on the climate is the fact that foreign mer- 
cantile houses and trading firms, both here and in 
Hong Kong, contract their employes for three years' 
service only, at the end of which they have a year's 
leave to go home and recuperate. Our troops are 
never kept there more than three years. 

I must say I felt a big surge of pride when I saw 
our soldiers out there. They are so big, clean-limbed, 
well set up. They make the natives look like a lot 
of rats. Even the English colonel who saw them 
parade at the fort, admitted to me that they were 
"si damned fine lot of men." 

You may think I am rather dogmatic about condi- 
tions here for the length of my stay, but you must re- 
member that I have traveled thirty days with thirty or 
forty of the best informed people in these Islands, 

94] 



MANILA. 



men of every condition, official and unofficial; and 
in the long days on the Pacific, where the Calendar 
is lost and Time has gone off to have a smoke, I lis- 
tened to them, and heard from them the story of om' 
attempt at Imperialism. 

Allow me one more generalization. Our occupation 
has been a good thing for the Filipino, though we do 
tax him pretty heavily. His land is at peace, his life 
and property are safe, his towns are clean and healthy, 
his children are at school, and our schools are fine. 
He has justice and a square deal. 

But for us it is simply the White Man's Burden. 
There is nothing in it for us but expense and the an- 
nual toll of valuable lives, sacrificed for a very poor 
lot of lazy, worthless beggars, who hate us and would 
rather kill an American than go to a cock-fight. 

If we should announce that we intend to hold the 
Islands, take down the tariff wall, and give the 
Islands free trade with the United States, then there 
would be great opportunities to make money here and 
in time we might recoup ourselves. 

But the argument that the possession of Manila 
strengthens us in the Orient is folly. It weakens us. 
We dare not offend Japan, for she could take these 

[95] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

Islands in a month. It does not help our trade in 
the Far East, for we are losing what little we ever 
had. It does not help our shipping, for we have 
none. Today not a single ship in the harbors of 
Yokohama, Manila, Hong Kong or Shanghai flies 
our flag, save the Pacific Mail, that is hanging on by 
its eyelids in the hope of a subsidy sometime. 

Our little brown brother is getting all the best of 
it, and we pay the piper. 

Before I leave Manila I want to tell you a story 
or two. These Islands are so rich in literary material 
that a writer could fill books and books with them. 
At the risk of forestalling a real author and spoiling 
a great story, I am going to tell you one or two. 

I have told you something of the Governor: he is 
Governor Pack, of Benguet province. He was a 
lieutenant in the Cuban War and was at Santiago; 
then he volunteered again, and came out here wath a 
Michigan regiment and chased insurrectos through 
the swamps and jungles for two years, and when the 
war was over was made Governor of the Igarrote 
province of Benguet, then the wildest and most in- 
accessible tract in the Islands. He has hunted and 

[96] 



MANILA. 



trapped for the Hudson's Bay Company in the Far 
North. He has farmed, banked, and done nearly 
everything, but at heart he is a gentleman adventurer, 
one of the old kind, one of those who, to quote Kip- 
ling, ^'fought, and sailed, and ruled the world." He 
loves adventure for its own sake, and his comfortable 
home in the States and the humdrum life of Battle 
Creek bore him. He was sent home to die last year, 
after a terrible operation for abscess of the liver. No 
one ever thought he would live, but he did, and as 
soon as he was well enough, back he came to take up 
his work, and I had the good fortune to be with him 
for a month on the ^^Nippon." What stories! What 
experiences! How it broadens one's horizon to meet 
a man like that, who has ruled 60,000 naked savages 
with the power of life and death, pacified them, civ- 
ilized them in a way, cut roads, built towns, explored 
and delimited a country as impenetrable as Darkest 
Africa, given those savages the White Man's Rule 
and taught them that the White Man can be just, 
and that he has gifts worth their taking. 

Well! my story waits. I love Governor Pack, and 
when I go talking about him, I grow garrulous,— 
so here goes. 

[971 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

THE STORY OF ARITA. 

In Manila there is a great stone building, known as 
Bilibid Prison, one of the gloomiest and most terrible 
penal fortresses in the world. 

When the Americans took the city, it was full of 
all sorts, gentle and simple, guilty and innocent, 
malefactors, high-born men and women, criminals 
who deserved the garrote and patriots who deserved 
the laurel wreath. 

While the Americano brought with one hand the 
sword, in the other he held the scales : Justice above 
all. Justice to this prostrate people who knew the 
word only as a vague abstraction. When the red 
harvest of war was reaped, the moment the mauser 
and the krag had ceased their bloody argument, the 
first thought of this strange big, keen-eyed race from 
across the sea was Justice, Justice for all, high and 
low. And so those gloomy vaults were opened, rec- 
ords scanned, and for most the doors swimg outward, 
— out into the open and God's free air. But many 
of the records had been destroyed, no charge remained, 
and justice demanded punishment for the guilty, as 
well as freedom for the innocent, and so strict search 
was made in every case, that Justice might be done. 

[98] 



MANILA. 



Among these prisoners was one Achdan, an Igor- 
rote, detained four years; "cause of detention, un- 
known." As Governor of the Igorrotes the case was 
turned over to Pack. "Find out why he is here and 
report." 

It did not take long. Every Igorrote knew the 
story of Achdan, Arita, Lunkai, and Martinez. 

Lunkai was the widow of a head chief, overlord of 
some six or seven tribes. At his death she succeeded 
to the headship. A woman of masculine mind, strong, 
just and fearless, she ruled her people well and they 
prospered. She was wealthy, with great herds of 
cattle, rich coffee lands in the valleys, horses, man- 
servants and maid-servants. She had no children, 
but there were three nieces, children of her younger 
sister; and the eldest, Arita, was the Pearl of the Ig- 
orrotes. She must have been very beautiful, for she is 
known and talked of in Manila to this day. I heard 
a Frenchman at the Army and Navy Club aUude to 
her Bs "La Belle Sauvage, the most beautiful woman 
m the Islands." 

Arita was nearly sixteen, a fuU-grown woman in 
that clime, when her aunt sent her with a cargo of 
coffee to Trinidad, the Spanish capital of Benguet. 

[99] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

She was to market the coffee, buy the cotton, the 
knives, the tools and necessaries for the ensuing year, 
and with her in charge of the loaded ponies and the 
other servants, went Achdan, hapless Achdan. When 
they reached Trinidad, from whence in those days, 
carabao carts took their produce to the port of San 
Fernando, one Martinez, a Spanish captain, had but 
then been appointed Governor of Benguet, with head- 
quarters at its capital of Trinidad. He was handsome, 
gallant, dapper, and above all a horseman; more, a 
centaur. He rode as few ride, and he rode the best 
horseflesh the Islands could produce. Now it hap- 
pens that the Igon'otes are daft over horses. They 
admire above all else a good horseman. They will 
work for nothing over horses rather than draw a 
wage at any other employment. 

Arita shared this passion of her race, and as if Eros 
had expressly designed it, she saw Martinez for the 
first time on horseback. Handsome enough on foot, 
he was a god mounted, and he rode into her heart 
without knocking. Straightway she fell in love with 
him. Love ! — she loved as only a woman of the trop- 
ics, and a savage at that, can love. He possessed her, 
body and soul. 

[100] 



MANILA. 



She sold her aunt's coffee, bought the necessaries 
she was charged with, and sent Achdan and his fellow- 
sevants homewards. She herself lingered in Trinidad 
to gaze her fill on Martinez. He was young, single, 
unattached. It did not take him long to notice this 
''Belle Sauvage," nor to see how matters stood, nor 
to come to conclusions with her. Within a week 
she had entered his house as his "Querida." What 
is that? Literally, ''deary"; in short, his mistress. 
But not that exactly. It is something more. The 
old Spanish law of the Islands recognizes this relation 
between a Spaniard and a native. It is quasi-legal. 
The children inherit. It is below the wife and above 
the mistress. So there were Arita and Martinez, 
both by this time wildly in love with each other, 
wildly happy. Arita had a talent for music, and 
Martinez had it cultivated. She learned the harp 
and the guitar. She learned "to sing, to wear shoes 
and corsets, to do up her hair in Spanish style, and 
more and more Martinez adored her and Arita forgot 
her aunt and her sisters and her valley home. 

Of course it could not last — it never does. News 
travels faster in that country than you would think 
where there are no telegraphs or mails or even roads, 
[101] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

and soon, very soon, old Lunkai heard that her niece, 
her dearest, the Pearl of the Hills, was the '^querida" 
of a hated Spaniard. 

Forthwith, she sent four spears, i. e., grown war- 
riors, old enough to handle a spear, to capture Arita 
and bring her back. They lay in wait, and in an un- 
guarded moment seized her and carried her back to 
Lunkai. There was no punishment, no reproaches; 
she was set at her old tasks, but watched. In three 
days she eluded them, and through jungle and forest, 
across mountains and torrents, by pathless ways, she 
rejoined her lover. Once more she was captured, 
once more she escaped. A third time, a fourth time, 
and when she was retaken the fifth time, Lunkai 
warned her that the next flight would be her last, and 
the punishment of the Igorrotes would be hers. 

Still she dared, and once more, half-naked, her bare 
feet bruised and bleeding, returned to Martinez. 
Then Martinez guarded her ; soldiers surrounded her 
when she went abroad, watched her waking and sleep- 
ing. Every Igorrote that entered the town was under 
surveillance. A year passed by; they were happy. 
Arita grew more beautiful, she sang like a thrush 
and played divinely. Martinez worshipped her, but 
[102] 



MANILA 



in time the guard relaxed, and Lunkai's servants, who 
had never ceased to watch for a moment, reheved and 
changed from time to time, but always there, seized 
her and carried her back to the mountains. 

Lunkai summoned her sub-chiefs, and trial was 
had. Till far into the night they debated. She was 
their fairest, their dearest. They hesitated, but at 
the last they pronounced her doom. 

She was bound, Achdan brought the lime, and 
Lunkai with her own hands rubbed it into Arita's 
eyes till her sight was gone. Her eyes had shown her 
the way to sin. Through her eyes she had fallen, her 
eyes had offended, and her eyes were destroyed. 
That is the justice of the Igorrote. '^f thine eye 
offend thee, pluck it out." That was all; except for 
this awful punishment she was treated tenderly. 

Martinez missed her, but believed that she would 
return as before. Once more news travels quickly, 
especially ill news, and soon Martinez knew. He 
was of the cool, tenacious Spanish type. He did not 
rage and rave, but struck, struck as the adder strikes, 
without warning. He gathered his soldiers, and 
within an hour was on his way to the hills. Excuses 
for a raid on the Igorrotes were not wanting in those 
[103] 



THE. FAR EAST TODAY. 

days. There was always war smouldering between 
them and the Spaniards, and Martinez swept through 
their valley as a devouring flame. He burned and 
slew like an avenging angel. Believe me, they paid 
dearly for that act of Justice, the innocent and the 
guilty. He slew the chiefs, captured Lunkai and Ach- 
dan, and once more held in his arms his blinded 
beauty, more dear to him than ever. 

Lunkai and Achdan were sent to the Bilibid, there 
to languish till Dewey came. Lunkai died shortly, 
but Achdan lived. 

Martinez took Arita to Manila, and sought the most 
famous oculists without result; her sight was gone. 
He continued her education in music, till she became 
famous. Shortly after, he was ordered home and he 
took her with him. On the way home, he died of the 
plague and was buried at sea. Today Arita is a pro- 
fessional musician in Spain, not on the stage, but as 
an entertainer at private houses, at dinners and the 
like. And so these two principals pass from the story, 
and we return to Achdan, hapless Achdan. 

Four years he lingered in the horrors of the Bilibid, 
to his free savage soul, four eternities, and then came 
the Governor. He had Taft's pardon, and refused an 

[104] 



MANILA. 



invitation to dinner at the Palace to take it to Achdan 
himself. AVhen the door was opened, when the Gov- 
ernor spoke to him in his own tongue, and told him he 
was free, he was dazed. He stumbled into the sun- 
light, hearing as though in a dream his native tongue, 
so long forgotten, and not till he was in the carriage 
with the Governor did he realize that he was free. 
And then he, this warrior, the man with three rings 
on his spear — and each ring means an enemy slain in 
open fight — broke down. He v/ept and groveled and 
kissed Pack's hands, his feet and his garments. 

The Governor got him clothes, took him to a hotel, 
fed him and gave him a room, but when morning 
came there was Achdan asleep across the Governor's 
threshold on the floor. That morning they started 
for the hills, taking the railroad to Dagupan. On 
the way the Governor's old trouble seized him. He 
had a hemorrhage, and v/as taken to the hospital 
at Dagupan insensible. Achdan could not be driven 
away, but slept on the floor beside the cot. 

When they reached Baguio, the center of the Igor- 
rote country. Pack dismissed him and supposed the 
incident closed. He did not then know the Igorrote 
character. Achdan went away, but a week later, one 
[105] 



THrE FAR EAST TODAY. 

morning the Governor found Achdan squatted on his 
hams before the door. Achdan explained that he 
owed his life to the Governor, and had come back to 
pay the debt by taking care of the Governor's horses. 
The Governor told him that he already had a good 
groom, in the person of Bachdan, another Igorrote, 
whom he could not discharge without cause, and that 
he had no place for Achdan. Achdan listened and 
went away. In a half-hour Bachdan the groom came 
in and said he had been discharged by Achdan; that 
Achdan owed the Governor a debt that he must work 
out, which he could only do by caring for the Gov- 
ernor's horses, and therefore he, Bachdan, had given 
up his place that Achdan might keep the faith of an 
Igorrote and pay his debt. 

No amount of discussion could change it, so the 
Governor finally took Bachdan as interpreter, to ac- 
company him on his trips among his natives, and Ach- 
dan took the horses. He made a first-class groom, 
but would take no wages, — he was working out his 
his debt. 

Finally at the end of a year the Governor offered 
him his regular wage of 120 pesos, 60 dollars gold, 
for the year, and told him that unless he took it his 

[106] 



MANILA. 



job was done, and also advised him to go back to his 
native valley, get a wife and settle down. After a 
long argument, Achdan agreed to take half his wages, 
go home for a visit and see what he could do in the 
way of a wife. 

So Achdan took 60 pesos and went home. He 
found a girl he liked, contracted with her father for 
her, and then they must have a betrothal feast. So 
Achdan spent the rest of his money for a fat cow and 
a pig; the neighbors were invited in and feasted, 
and the betrothal was duly solemnized. Then Ach- 
dan came back, worked another year for the Governor, 
took his wages, got married, built a nipa shack, 
bought two cows and a pony, and is getting to be a 
head man in his tribe. But if the Governor goes 
within twenty miles of that shack, he must go there 
to sleep and be fed by Mrs. Achdan, while Achdan 
once more recounts to his tribesmen how the ''Chief 
with the white hair" saved his life. 

So there is the story — Life, Love, and Death. 

Some one was once telling Hiram D. a very dull, 

long-winded story. Noting his hearer's wandering 

attention, he sought to arrest it with the remark, 

''This is a true story.'' "Thank God!" said Hiram, 

no7] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

'Hhere is some excuse for the story.'' So my story 
has that excuse. 

These Igorrotes are a remarkable race of savages. 
They muster some 12,000 spears, fighting-men all. 
When an Igorrote kills, he puts a ring on his spear. 
They are fearless, temperate, honest, and industrious. 

Once when the smallpox was decimating them, 
Pack said to one of their chiefs, '^AVhy does your God 
permit this? A^Tiy does he send this sickness upon 
you?" The Igorrote chief thought a long time, and 
finally said : 

''You are our Governor ; you order, we obey. You 
make us do many things we do not understand. You 
make us pay a tax, lay aside our spears, cut roads, 
live in peace, bring our disputes to you. We do not 
know why, but we know you are just and wise, we 
trust you, and do not ask questions. Our God is 
more wise, more just than you; we trust him, we do 
not complain, we take what he sends." 

Could any Christian have answered for his faith 
in better terms? 

Well! the anchor is apeak, the last cascoe has left 
[ 108 ] 



MANILA 



the ship; our friends of a few days are overside; 
likely we shall never see them again, and they have 
grown very dear in these few days in this alien land, 
whose mysterious Asiatic shadow draws the American 
kinship so close. It is just '^ Howdy and Good-by." 
A meeting and a parting. Fain we are to linger, but 
may not. Cathay lies before us, dim, vast, myste- 
rious. As we leave Corregidor behind, the short 
twilight of these latitudes fades swiftly and the tropic 
night with its velvet blackness of sky, its phosphores- 
cent sea, its strange new constellations, is over us, 
and Hong Kong is yonder. 



[109] 



HONQ KONG. 

" Never the lotus closes, never the wild fowl wake, 
But a soul goes out on the east-wind, that died for Eng- 
land's sake. 
Man or woman or suckling, mother or bride or maid. 
For on the bones of the English the English flag is stayed." 

On a wide hillside overlooking the Happy Valley 
and shadowed by the mighty Peak of Hong Kong 
lies the English cemetery, and reading there the ages 
of the dead, and marking the number that lie there, 
I realize anew the price that England pays for em- 
pire. 

'^ Edwards Bruce, aged seven," ^Thas. Albert 

Bruce, aged three," ''Mary, the loved wife of , 

aged twenty-seven," and so on. This city of the 
dead already outnumbers the living, and Victoria, 
or British Hong Kong, is but sixty years old. 

After the Opium War of 1840, England secured this 
island, where already there was a Chinese town. 
Eight years ago she secured a ninety-nine year ''lease," 
as it is euphemistically called, on a tract of forty-five 
thousand square miles lying back of Kowloon, and 

[110] 



HONG KONG. 



her ^^ sphere of influence" extends up the Pearl river, 
to Canton, where there is another British settlement, 
over the West river, the rich deltas and water-ways 
of both. 

Hong Kong is a crown colony ruled by a Governor 
and Council, appointed from home. There are some 
twenty thousand foreigners (of whom only three 
hundred are Americans) and about two hundred 
thousand Chinese. 

You doubt this statement, for the whole island is 
less than three miles long and narrow, and the town 
itself clings to a narrow shore against the mountain 
walls. However, it is true, for the Chinese occupy 
Hong Kong at a ratio of 640,000 to the acre. Can 
you believe that? It is inconceivable till you have 
seen it, and the Encyclopsedia Britannica is my au- 
thority. After you have seen a real Chinese city, 
not an imitation Chinatown in America, you will 
not doubt it. We will discuss it more at length 
when we get to Canton. 

I believe that I have said something about beau- 
tiful harbors before, and have unfortunately ex- 
hausted my stock of adjectives which I should have 
reserved for Hong Kong. You approach it through 

[111] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

a narrow gut between sterile hills, heavily fortified, 
and then the great estuary of the Pearl and West 
rivers opens before you, a land-locked bay big enough 
to hold all the fleets of the world; good anchorage; 
its only drawback the prevalence of the typhoon. 
Kowloon, the naval station, is on your right, the 
city on the left, on an island, and above it towers the 
peak, three thousand feet. Terrace above terrace, 
with verdure and greenness, winding roads and path- 
ways, and at the very top the signal station and ob- 
servatory of the Far East from whence they signal 
the approach of the dreaded typhoon. The English 
built Hong Kong as they always build, for time and 
eternity, solid, stodgy, but not beautiful. 

A tramway follows the bund or '^sea road" clear 
to the Happy Valley, a beautiful spot where the race- 
track is, and where they play polo and cricket and 
tennis and golf, without at least one of which no Eng- 
lishman can live. The town is a tower of babel for 
tongues. Every race of the East meets here to deal 
and traffic. Sikhs in huge turbans police the streets, 
and Mohammedans with their white, turbans, Parsees, 
Mahrattas, Afghans and Pathans. Cantonese and 
Manchus, Malays, Burmese, Lascars, as well as all the 

[112] 



HONG KONG 



races of Europe, jostle one another in motley cos- 
tumes and strange speech. The universal tongue is 
'^ pidgin English," which I shall describe later. 

It is the clearing-house of Asia. Every ship 
touches here, and in point of tonnage it is, I am told, 
the second largest port in the world. There were 
over fifty ocean steamers in the harbor, besides river 
steamers, junks and sampans without number. It 
is the great military and naval station of England in 
the Far East, and she keeps here some twenty thou- 
sand soldiers and sailors, and on the Peak is a great 
sanatorium for the invalided. The Peak is one of the 
most picturesque of hills ; hardly a mountain, bulky, 
irregular in shape, and it is the home of all who can 
afford to escape the stifling heat of the town. The 
difference in temperature is amazing. In the town 
you swelter, and in twenty minutes, on the Peak 
above, you button your coat and hang on to your 
hat. A funicular railway takes you up about two 
thousand feet, through scenery and greenery in be- 
wildering variety ; and all the way up, on every but- 
tress, jut and foothold are great stone villas ,f with 
tropical gardens and views of the harbor and the sur- 
rounding country that are enchanting. There is a 

[113] 



THE. FAR EAST TODAY. 

hotel, very good, at the terminus of the funicular, and 
there you take chairs for the Peak itself, which is still 
a thousand feet above you. 

The chairs are of bamboo, with a green canopy top, 
borne by two men on their shoulders, who trot along 
\\;ith a jolting, bobbing motion that is good for the 
liver and bad for the temper. I have not been carried 
since I was a baby, and don't care for it. The sweat 
pours off the brown backs of the chair-men, the sun 
beats do^Mi on their bare heads, and if you have any 
sensibilities at all you feel for those coolies and it 
spoils the ride. All the way up are magnificent roads, 
but the horse is absent. Not one did I see in Hong 
Kong, except a couple of polo ponies kept for sport, 
not use. Everything is carried by coolies, men and 
women both, on their shoulders. Every stick and 
stone for the great barracks, these superb villas, 
these winding roads and water-ways, every stick of 
timber and furniture, every sack of lime and cement, 
has been lifted two or three thousand feet by coolies. 
Man is cheaper than the horse, cheaper than steam, 
but they know how to economize effort, and it is 
curious to watch their devices to save time. A cooly 
woman will start up the hill with three loads. She 
[114] 



HONG KONG 



carries one, say a hundred yards, sets it down and 
goes back for a second, sets that down and back for 
a third. She gets a rest walking downhill unloaded, 
and so gets the three loads to the top with no pause 
for rest, no time wasted. She swings two baskets 
from a bamboo pole and walks with a peculiar swing-* 
ing motion that keeps the load always over the foot 
that is on the ground. Twenty cents a day in silver, 
ten cents a day gold, is the wage, and every stick and 
stone in Hong Kong has been carried in that way. 
Occasionally a heavy stone or a piece of machinery 
is placed on a cart, but that is drawn by coolies. 

Just across from my room a great stone block is 
building. The stagings are of bamboo lashed to- 
gether, not a nail in them. Shelters of matting keep 
off the sun and rain. The blocks are hoisted by hand 
and the work goes on slowly but steadily and cheaply 
twelve hours a day and no Sundays. The cooly 
moves slowly but he never stops. He neither hastens 
nor pauses. 

What are coolies as distinguished from other Chi- 
nese? They are what we call at home '^ common 
laborers," if such a thing exists in America. 

They are just muscle. They are born to toil, to 

[115] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

carry burdens, to pull rickshaws, to do the menial 
work, to bear without alleviation the Primal Curse. 
Never can they rise or change their condition. They 
cannot take the examinations for public employment. 
They and their women and children for all time must 
do the same. The brothels of the East are recruited 
from his daughters if they are comely. The others 
must labor as their brothers and husbands do, at 
labor that seems inhuman, fit only for beasts. Their 
rank and station is fixed ; there is no escape from it. 
They sell themselves in far-off lands to toil that is 
almost certain death, such employment as the Pan- 
ama Canal, for a pittance paid in advance to their 
families, to a father or mother too old to work. They 
are the most industrious, faithful, frugal self-denying 
class in the world. I can never look at one without 
a pang. They are so honest, so patient, so kindly, 
they get so little: why did God make them so? 
Their desperate poverty, far beneath anything you 
ever see at home, their patience, their self-sacrifice, 
their hopelessness, are sublimely pathetic. They 
dumbly and unconsciously accuse the Universe, the 
whole Scheme of Things as they are. Is God just? 
Is there a heaven for these poor creatures? Will it 

[116] 



HONG KONG 



somewhere be made up to them? If not, there is no 
justice anywhere. The scheme fails and we are but 
the jests of an Idle God. 

Some facts about the Chinese stand out with such 
startling clarity, they are so certain and well attested, 
that you cannot escape them; and one is their hon- 
esty. You may ask any man who has dealt with 
them and he will tell you the same, that they are the 
most absolutely honest and reliable race in the world. 
A Chinese merchant will commit suicide if he cannot 
meet his obligations. He will suffer any loss, he will 
sell himself into slavery rather than fail of his word. 
China is the only country in the world that has no 
law for the collection of debt, — needs none. This 
statement rests not upon a preponderance of the 
evidence : it is unanimous ; there is no dispute about 
it. Every man in the East will tell you that he had 
rather deal with the Chinese than any other people in 
the world. They are slow in a bargain, they weigh 
every penny, but their word once given, that ends it. 
You need no bond, no guaranty ; he will die before he 
will shirk one jot of his promise. Those who deal 
with the Japanese demand an iron-clad bank guaranty 
and watch them besides. With the Chinese, the 

[117] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

naked word is enough — no writing, no bond, just his 
word. I could tell of a hundred stories I have heard 
that illustrate this; stories of loss and suffering borne 
uncomplainingly as a matter of course in the fulfill- 
ment of a contract. Just this morning the United 
States District Judge for the District of Shanghai, 
in a suit between two Americans and a Chinese, where 
the evidence rested solely on the word of the Chinese 
disputed by both Americans, gave judgment for the 
Chinese, and in doing so said: ''It is a well-known 
fact that Chinese merchants and business men are 
honest and trustworthy and faithful in the perform- 
ance of their obligations under their "contracts." 

Certainly it is a great thing to have established such 
a reputation with all the nations that deal here, so 
that the word of one of them is taken by an alien 
judge against that of his countryman. So that Chi- 
nese has become a synonym for honesty. No little 
thing, that. ''Better is a good name than great 
riches." The Chinese has it. He is no fool; he is 
just as acute, as far-seeing, just as shrewd at a bar- 
gain, and he has more honesty than any of the peo- 
ple who deal with him; and there he holds an ad- 
vantage. In the long run he will get his own again. 

[118] 



HONG KONG. 



He is recovering his own trade, and he will retake 
Hong Kong and Shanghai some day as he has retaken 
Macao. All over the East the cashiers are Chinese. 
Even in Japan, in banks and hotels, the boys who 
handle the money are Chinese. Not only is he hon- 
est, but he is the swiftest and most accurate account- 
ant in the world. He can count money faster than 
the expert teller of a New York bank; he can com- 
pute as rapidly as a machine, and he never makes a 
mistake. He has a natural head for figures, and 
some day he will be what the Phoenician was once, 
the merchant of the world. He knows the game, he 
has patience, courtesy, he can figure a profit closer 
than a Jew or a Scotchman. Inch by inch he is re- 
gaining his trade, by reason of these qualities. 

Whence comes this superlative honesty? Con- 
fucius, some say. But it was there before Confucius. 
It is racial, like the laziness of the Filipino, the shrewd- 
ness of the Yankee, or the color of the Negro. Con- 
fucius was one of the most practical of the world's 
ethical teachers. You hear it said that Confucius 
announced the Golden Rule long before Christ. Not 
so. One of his pupils suggested it to him, and he 
commented on it ironically that it was very fine but 

[119] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

very difficult to attain. It is written that way in his 
books. Certainly he was a great man, and he re- 
mains today in China the greatest ethical force. Bud- 
dhism for a while swept over China and obscured 
him, but his books are today the Chinese classics. 
His Book of Rites, prescribing the forms and cere- 
monies of Chinese life, is the authority. His wisdom, 
his maxims, are the rules of Chinese morality, and 
more than that, Korea and Japan have sat at his feet. 
The Testament of lyeyasu, the first of the great Tok- 
agawa Shoguns, one of the most remarkable docu- 
ments of the world, akin to ''The Prince" of Machi- 
avelli, is filled with maxims from Confucius. Con- 
fucius crystallized and codified existing Chinese mo- 
rality, social observances. Governmental systems and 
rites, gave reasons for them, enforced them, so that 
they remain today unchanged, with all the force of 
law. He enforced Ancestor worship, already a cult, 
and so made it a part of Chinese life that it will never 
be extinguished. Buddhism prevailed in China and 
Japan, only by compromisng with this religion, by 
engrafting Buddhism upon and amalgamating it 
with Ancestor Worship, by fully recognizing the du- 
ties and rites of this religion. The Jesuits had great 

[120] 



HONG KONG 



success in both China and Japan, so long as they tol- 
erated this worship. Indeed, they became in Japan 
a national danger. 

But the moment Pope Clement at the instance of 
the Dominicans forbade further toleration, Chris- 
tianity failed, the missions languished, disappeared, 
and the Christian propaganda in the East has made 
itself felt since, only as a forerunner of invasion, an 
incitement to violence, an excuse for territorial rob- 
bery. No one can even dimly understand these two 
peoples, the Chinese and Japanese, without knowing 
something of this religion, as I have said before, the 
most ancient, widely spread, permanent and influen- 
tial cult the world has knovm. In Japan it is 
''Shinto,^' "the Way of the Gods.'' In China it is 
loosely called Confucianism. I propose to sketch it 
briefly, and perhaps imperfectly. 

When the parent dies, he does not go to some dim 
far-off heaven, forgetting in its joys the concerns of 
earth. He lingers about his home. He becomes not 
exactly a God, but a "higher power." He can help 
or hurt his family. He can bring good or bad for- 
tune. He can influence the elements, bring timely 
rains, prevent earthquakes and pestilence. He must 

[ 121 1 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

be propitiated by offerings. Before his tomb in China 
are placed flowers and tiny offerings of food, and joss- 
sticks are burned. In Japan these offerings are 
placed before the ancestral tablets in each home. It 
is no longer thought that the spirit needs food, but it 
is pleased, propitiated by the remembrance. It fol- 
lows the fortunes of the family, aids it if pleased, 
injures it if its rites are neglected. It is always 
present, watches all that is done, knows all that is 
thought, and its worship must be done, its tablets 
handed down, and the rites performed in the male 
line. If there be no son of the body, one is adopted 
who can keep the house, the tablets or the tomb, and 
perform the necessary rites. Unhappy the man who 
has no son to bring the Water of the Dead to wash 
his corpse, and lay the rice flowers before his tomb. 
Hence polygamy. If the first wife is childless, a 
second is taken to bear a son, a third or a fourth. 
Hence the undesirability of female children, and the 
infanticide, that blots the Chinese character. 

If due attention is paid to these ancestral rites, 
these higher powers will surround the family with 
benign influences, avert misfortune, and bring health 
and happiness. In short, it is a sort of family spirit- 

[122] 



HONG KONG. 



ualism. Confucius merely expands it, codifies and 
ritualizes it. 

A profound belief in the existence and immediate 
presence of a host of ancestors who know the deeds 
and thoughts of their living descendants, who are 
pleased and propitiated with filial observances and 
upright conduct, and offended at wrong-doing, must 
inevitably and deeply affect the life and conduct of 
the believer. He cannot sin secretl}^, for they know 
all. If he fails of his duty toward them, to his family 
or his people, they are offended, their help is with- 
drawn and misfortune follows. This week the Im- 
perial family are offering prayers at the family tombs, 
to avert a drought in North China. They account 
for all misfortunes and sorrows by some failure of 
these observances, some lapse from duty. It is very 
real, very present, perhaps the most intimate religion 
in the daily life of a people that the world knows. It 
is persistent. Buddhism and Taoism have swept 
over it for a time, but it has survived both, and Con- 
fucianism in China and Shintoism in Japan are the 
state religions, the religions of the people. Buddhism 
profoundly influenced both races. Its temples are 
everywhere in both countries, but today its altars are 

[123] 



THE, FAR EAST TODAY. 

deserted, its shrines abandoned, and the Old Way 
has conquered. But it is not alone to the dead par- 
ent that such worship and affection are due. The 
living claim it. With us love flows downward. We 
love our children, and they love theirs. With us 
parental love is stronger than filial. With the Chi- 
nese it is the reverse. Love flows upward to the 
source of life. No crime is so dreadful as parricide. 
No offense so great as neglect of one's parents. There 
are innumerable instances of coolies who sell them- 
selves to exile in some foreign land, to toil that surely 
means death, for a pittance to support the last years 
of a father or mother too old to work. 

In an account of the official career of a man just 
appointed as Governor of one of the important prov- 
inces, it was noted that in 1890 he resigned a lucrative 
appointment in Pekin to attend upon his mother in 
her declining years. At her death he was reappointed, 
but he spent four years in waiting upon her alone. 
It was entirely natural here, but how often would it 
occur with us? It follows, too, that the authority of 
the parent is supreme. The mother selects the wife. 
The father is the absolute master of the son. In 
both countries the family government is supreme, 

[124] 




CHINESE PUNISHMENT. 



HONG KONG 



unquestioned, and, as I shall later show, it has af 
fected Japanese life as profoundly as Chinese. 

We made our headquarters in Hong Kong for ten 
days and excursions from there to Canton and Macao. 
Aside from the heat it was delightful, as we made 
many charming friends among the English and Amer- 
icans. 

American trade in the East is languishing. It has 
never recovered from the boycott of two years ago. 
We at home never knew how serious, how effectual 
it was. From Shanghai to the Straits, no Chinaman 
would buy a penny of American goods. The Sperry 
Flour Company, the largest exporters of American 
flour, lost 75 per cent of their trade and have not yet 
recovered it. For thirty days the Standard Oil Co. 
did not receive a single Chinese order. It gradually 
relaxed, but it was nearly the deathblow to our trade. 
Our shipments have fallen off in the last two years, 
while the English and Germans have gained steadily. 
One reason for this is that Americans will not take the 
trouble to condition their goods for the foreign mar- 
ket. To sell in China, goods must be prepared and 
packed in a certain way, and in packages that a cooly 

[1251 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

can caiT}'. We will not do this. Our home market 
is so great, so profitable, that we do not care for the 
foreign market ; do not think it worth while to take 
this trouble. The English and Germans study the 
trade and its requirements minutely, and go to any 
amount of trouble to satisfy it. As a result, we get 
only what they must buy from us and cannot else- 
where. Clocks, sewing-machines, railway material 
and machinery' they must have from us. Another 
reason is that they send their best men here, we send 
our poorest, and this is particularly true of our consu- 
lar agents. Our consular sendee out here is a joke with 
ever}' one. A bunch of second-rate poUticians, with- 
out experience or fitness, with no knowledge of trade 
and commerce. 

A conspicuous exception is the Standard Oil. They 
send their highest-priced men out here, and have 
built up a wonderful Vjusiness. They are ever}'where. 
At Canton I saw a big six-thousand-ton tramp un- 
loading oil into a great tank station. There is a 
great storage plant at Hong Kong, another at Shang- 
hai, and they have broken ground for a big refinery 
on the Yangste above Woosung. The engineer in 
charge of it was number two engineer on the great 
[126] 



HONG KONG. 



Nile dam at Assouan, Egypt, a C. E. with a world- 
wide reputation. That is the kind of men they hire. 
I was told that they have on the water en route for 
the East right now, eighteen steamers loaded with 
crude and refined oil. While we are chasing them 
out of Arkansas and Missouri and Kansas, they are 
occupying the rest of the earth. I have no doubt 
that when Peary discovers the North Pole and goes 
waltzing up to raise the Stars and Stripes he will find 
a Standard Oil tank-field, and a bunch of Standard 
men convincing the natives that ''Superior Water 
White Oil" is better than blubber. 

They say here that in ten years the Standard can 
contemplate the home market with indifference, for 
they will have the rest of the world, — no competition 
and no anti-trust laws. It is the only American 
enterprise that is making headway out here. They 
are building refineries all over the East, because it is 
impossible to ship gasoline so far; labor is cheaper, 
and the by-products bring more. Soon nothing but 
crude oil will be shipped here. 

The Americans in Hong Kong celebrated the glo- 
rious Fourth at the Standard Oil offices, a whole floor 
of the biggest office building in the town, a celebration 

[127] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

that consisted chiefly of champagne punch. I have 
seen it before, but I never saw it mixed in a bath-tub. 
All the English were invited, and there was a bath for 
all ; and besides, a bucket brigade of coolies passing 
champagne from hand to hand like water-buckets at a 
fire. Everyone sang ''My Country, 'tis of Thee," 
English and all, and occasionally the Standard Oil 
boss, who looks like John D., would let off a bunch of 
Chinese firecrackers, each one of which makes a noise 
like a thirteen-inch gun. I shall not forget that cel- 
ebration for a while, nor how my head felt on the 5th. 

Hong Kong at night is like fairy-land. The fa- 
vorite way to cool off is to take the Kowloon ferry and 
cross the bay a couple of times. From Kowloon the 
view is a dream. The water-front is outlined with 
blazing shop-fronts and godowns, and from this 
crescent of fire the city arises tier on tier, thinning 
out till only the villas remain, each aglow with light ; 
and far, far above, sometimes above clouds of mist, 
gleam out the great arc signal-lights of the Peak. 
One of the world's great pictures at night is Hong 
Kong; I have never seen anything more beautiful. 

Well, the ''Hansui" is waiting. Yonder lies Can- 
ton, seventy miles away, in the heart of Old China. 

[128] 



HONG KONG 



We are done with Hong Kong, and from the big 
promenade deck we watch the flare of its hghts die 
down and down till they disappear and the cool wind 
blows from off the rice-fields. We are in Cathay. 



[129] 



CANTON. 

It was a considerable city two thousand years ago, 
and its authentic history dates back so far. For 
more than a thousand years it has been the most im- 
portant town in South China, and is pure Chinese, 
body and bone, as distinguished from Pekin, which is 
Manchu, the race of the conquerors, a branch of the 
Kin Tartars, from whom Manchuria takes its name. 

The Ming or ''Bright" dynasty, the last of the 
Chinese emperors, was overthrown by the Manchus 
about the middle of the seventeenth century, and they 
have since held the throne. The present Emperor, 
Kuang Hsui, is childless, nearly imbecile, and, as 
everyone knows, that extraordinary woman Tsi An, 
the Dowager Empress, born a slave, rules while the 
Emperor plays with American clocks or amuses him- 
self in his abundantly stocked harem. 

The Yangste river is the dividing-line: south is 

pure Chinese; north, Manchu. In Canton we shall see 

a city purely Chinese ; nothing else save the soldiers 

and policemen, Vho are Manchu. In Pekin we shall 

[130] 



CANTON 



see nothing but Manchus, save a few officials. The 
Cantonese are the merchants and traders, the Man- 
chus the warriors. Confucius was from the south, and 
his abhorrence of war, contempt for soldiers, and 
admiration for the arts of peace, have stamped all 
South China. 

In the south has always been great disaffection 
toward the reigning family. Here the Taiping rebels 
made head in 1860, held Nanking and Old Shanghai 
and all the south, and practically divided the empire 
in half. Had it not been for Ward and Burlingame, 
two American adventurers, who organized the Im- 
perial forces into the ''Ever Victorious Army," and 
Chinese Gordon, who later commanded and led it to 
victory, there would probably be two Chinas today. 
Gordon, a Christian fanatic, a very great man, made 
his reputation before the walls of Nankin, and gave 
his life at Khartoum, a victim to the bitter prejudice 
and cowardly foreign policy of Gladstone. 

By the way, how many of my readers know of the 
vastness of that Tai-Ping Rebellion, that bloody 
drama of internecine warfare that worked out in 
China almost without notice by the world? When 
I tell you that in that war, lasting less than three 

[ 131 ] 



THE. FAR EAST TODAY. 

years, more blood and treasure were sacrificed than 
in our War of the Rebelhon and the Russo-Japanese 
War combined, you will get some idea of what a vast 
country this China is. More than twenty million 
lives were sacrificed in that one war. Whole cities 
were destroyed and every inhabitant massacred, and 
yet so vast is the population of China, so great its 
resources, that the ravages of that gigantic conflict 
were more speedily repaired than those of our War of 
the Rebellion. 

We reached Canton by a magnificent river steamer 
from Hong Kong in the early morning, and after 
breakfast on the boat, found our guide Ah Kow await- 
ing us. Not only is it unsafe to go through Canton 
without a guide, where the anti-foreign feeling is 
intense and bitter, but it is impossible. I defy any 
European to find his way in that Chinese city. You 
think because you have seen Mott street in New York 
or Chinatown in San Francisco, that you have seen 
a Chinese town. Bah ! They resemble each other as 
much as a pimple and a cancer. With our guide were 
chairs for the party, for the streets are so narrow that 
not even a Chinese wheelbarrow is used there. You 

[132] 



CANTON. 



must be carried in chairs, three bearers to each, in- 
cluding Ah Kow's, a very gaudy affair with screens 
and gauze curtains while ours are plain and open, and 
to my solidity are allotted four stalwart fellows. We 
make quite a procession, the four chairs and thirteen 
bearers, as we leave the wharf, and plunge into the 
sunless streets of Canton,— three Americans to two 
million Chinese, every one of whom hates us and would 
be glad of any excuse to mob us. Not very pleasant 
to think of. And how shall I describe the town? 
Hereafter when I have the nightmare I shall dream 
of Canton. 

A narrow river of yellow faces, with shaven fore- 
heads, faces hostile, sinister, sardonic, sneering at the 
Foreign Devils. Tall houses, narrow streets, three 
to four feet wide, overhead screens of matting to shut 
out what little sunlight might penetrate these gloomy 
alleys. Fantastic signs in green and gold and black, 
with strange hieroglyphics, waving banners and gro- 
tesque lanterns; a babel of raucous, guttural voices 
babbling strange, meaningless sounds, our chairs 
swaying and bobbing above the current of this end- 
less river of inhuman faces, threatening any moment 
to be submerged and overwhelmed; ten thousand 
[133] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

stinks and stenches, strange condiments, fish, flesh 
and fowl, monstrously dressed and displayed, thou- 
sands of human ants busy at unguessable occupa- 
tions, and over all an Inferno of heat. Heat such 
as we never know, — close, humid, compounded of a 
tropical sun, old sun-baked walls, and the emanation 
of thousands of swinking bodies. A heat that is like 
a pall from which there is no escape. Never a breath 
of fresh air, an open space, a tree, plant or flower, — 
ever the same endless, narrow ravines filled with 
sweltering inhumanity. To add to my comfort, 
prickly heat had broken out on me that morning, 
from my heels to my hair. It was as though I was 
enveloped in one large comprehensive mustard- 
plaster instead of clothing. I looked like a prairie- 
fire and felt Hke a fly-blister. 

Canton is famous for its porcelain, embroideries, 
silks, muslins, and above all for Mandarin coats, just 
now the fad for ladies' evening wear. So our first 
errand was to the shops, and for four hours I sat in 
my nice warm mustard-bath while A. and F. tried on 
Mandarin coats, pawed over silks and embroideries, 
priced jades and ivories, and invoked all the gods of 
womankind in admiration of the bargains, while Ah 
[134] 



CANTON 



Kow, an old hand, smoked endless cigars and smiled. 
Such bargaining. ''How much for this coat?'' ''One 
hundred forty dollar" (|70 gold). Ah Kow would 
light another cigar. " You like him, Missee ? " "Yes." 
"Seventy dollar." Then the merchant would explain 
that it meant ruin to sell for less than a hundred. He 
would have to sell his wife and daughters. Ah Kow 
would smoke and reiterate monotonously, "Seventy 
dollar." Then we would start to leave and the price 
would drop "Ninety dollar," "Eighty dollar," and 
then just in the street with a gesture of despair, the 
merchant would fold it up, take his seventy dollars 
and go back to chuckle over his profit. A Chinese 
would have gotten it for fifty or sixty. 

But after all the prices are. amazing. Embroidered 
grass-linen dress patterns, exquisite in design and 
workmanship, for twelve dollars ; that would be fifty 
at home. Table sets at a fifth of the home price. 
Hand-woven silks, "like wrinkled skins on scalded 
milk," yet firm as iron, for fifty cents a yard. 

F. is perhaps the worst bargainer imaginable with 
these people. She would pick up a plate. "How 
much?" '^Twelve dollars one dozen," fifty cents 
apiece gold. Then she would turn to me. "Do you 

[135] 



THE'FAR EAST TODAY. 

know what we pay for these at home ? — two and three 
dollars a plate." Mr. Chinese hears her, and there 
goes my bargain a-glimmering. 

He sees at once that we are suckers from U. S. A., 
where money grows on bushes and the streets are 
paved -with gold, and we get soaked accordingly. 
The lowest price is usually set in the street and just 
before we enter another shop. 

Well, I admit that these Canton shops are a great 
temptation; such beautiful things those patient, 
ill-paid artisans turn out, so astonishingly cheap. 
The moment an American woman reaches here she 
is seized with Dementia Shoppiana. You can tell 
from the wildness of her eye, the way her lips mutter 
calculations reducing Mexican dollars to gold. She 
is unconscious of the flight of time. Life and death, 
home, friends, even her personal appearance, are for- 
gotten in Frenzied Finance, and the Devil of the 
Bargain Counter posesses her wholly. 

But there are other things besides shops. We 
saw the Buddhist temple of the Five Hundred Gods, 
— 500, count them, — each gilded and smiling vacu- 
ously at the Foreign Devils just as he has smiled for 

[136] 




WATER CLOCK, CANTON. 



CANTON 



six hundred years, till their gilt is tarnished, their 
worship forgotten, their altars deserted, and only one 
toothless old bald-headed priest remains to show 
their faded glories for a trifling tip and explain the 
names and attributes of these forgotten deities. One 
surprise, seated among these imaginary gods, ruffed 
and bewhiskered, is the counterfeit presentment of 
an old friend, old man Marco Polo, over whose book 
I pored more years ago than I care to remember. 
He who was the first European to visit the court of 
Cathay, some six or seven hundred years ago. The 
Khan loved him, and had his statue placed here. 
Esteemed the Boss Liar of his time for many hundred 
years, later travelers confirmed him, and while his 
wooden statue has slowly lost its gilt and his worship 
has faded here, his reputation at home has been 
cleaned up and Marco is one of the immortals. I felt 
like shaking hands with him. It was a breath from 
the Long Past. 

Then we went to a real Chinese temple, where are 
sixty gods, one for each year of the Chinese cycle, 
and the true believer burns his joss-sticks before the 
god that stands for the year of his age. When he has 
run the gamut of the sixty he starts over again at 

[137] 



THE. FAR EAST TODAY. 

number one. A very comfortable worship. No 
picking and choosing among the saints for your patron, 
and doubting if you ought not to go to some other. 
It is all laid down by rule. 

We "tiffined" on the city wall, far above the noi- 
some city, where we could look out over the green 
countryside, and see the tombs, the far-ofT hills, the 
winding rivers and canals, and get a breath of fresh 
air. We saw the great nine-storied pagoda that 
dominates the city, and far off the Roman Catholic 
Cathedral, — the Old and the New. Just why the 
pagodas are nearly all nine-storied, not even Ah Kow 
could tell. We saw one on the river between Canton 
and Macao so old that a great cedar tree fully fifty 
feet high was growing from its top. The city wall of 
Canton is much like that of Manila, a Middle-Age 
structure still mounted with smooth-bores and 
guarded by a great moat that is given over to the cul- 
tivation of celery now. We ate our lunch brought 
from the boat, in an old tea-house, where the Manda- 
rins of the city come for their tiffin, bring their food 
and cooks, and get drunk on tea. We bought tea 
for ourselves and ''chow" for the bearers. Five 
cents apiece it cost me, and they ate so much they 

[138] 



C A N T;0 N . 



could hardly waddle. They had carried us five 
hours, up and down hills and stone steps, through 
tortuous streets, dodging loaded coolies, setting us 
down and taking us up with much grunting and many 
gutturals ; and when they got the remnant of our ham 
and chicken and lychees and bananas they came and 
kowtowed to us as though we had given them a feast. 
Poor devils, so patient and good-natured, and when 
night came and I paid them off, their regular wage of 
twenty-five cents of our money and then gave each 
one five cents for a tip; they camped before the hotel 
for an hour, in hopes of another job. 

Really I grow sentimental over these coolies. 
They are the downtrodden of the most downtrodden 
people of the world. Everyone abuses them, tramps 
on them, looks down on them, speaks to them as I 
would not speak to an American dog, and they bear 
it patiently, and yet they are human. "Man made 
He in his own image." How often we forget that in 
the Far East. No wonder they hate us. Some day 
they will rise up and cast us out. We take their land; 
we override and trample on them, desecrate their 
tombs; and mind you, "the tomb of his fathers," is 
not an empty phrase with these — it is the most sacred 

[139] 



T'H EFAR EAST TODAY. 

thing in the world. We send them missionaries to 
give them a rehgion they don't want, and when they 
reject it we make that an excuse to steal some more 
land. They have their faults — God knows we all do. 
Their system of human slavery is a blot, but it is not 
so long ago that we had it, and theirs is much more 
humane than ours was. They are cruel about some 
things, but they had a complex, highly organized 
civilization when we were naked savages. 

Some day the Big Man will come and China will 
Wake Up. When she does, look out. Already the 
leaven is working. We passed four newspaper offices, 
printing on American presses, Chinese nev/spapers. 
In every store were newspapers and men reading 
them. The press is comparatively free here — much 
freer than it is in Germany, for instance. The finest 
building in Canton is a newspaper office, native, and 
every one above the cooly class can read and write. 
They are thinking, discussing, criticizing. The Man- 
darins are accountable now as they never were before. 
The Giant is beginning to turn over in his sleep and 
ask what time it is. Four hundred millions of them, 
just as brave as anyone if they are led. The most in- 
dustrious and frugal people in the world. Here is 

[1401 



CANTON. 



the Yellow Peril, not in Japan. Japan has shot her 
bolt. like a squab, she was biggest when first 
hatched. She is poor. She cannot long maintain 
her armament. She will pass, but China is rich, 
richer than we dream of, in money, resources, and, 
above all, people. 

Just as we were leaving the tea-house after tiffin, 
came some twenty Mandarins, the civil and military 
officers of Canton, giving a farewell dinner to their 
Supreme Judge, who is retiring, a magnificent-looking 
old man. And believe me, there were some fine 
faces among those Mandarins. Big, clear-eyed, 
stately men, recruited, mind you, by the most stren- 
uous system of civil-service examination in the world 
from the commonalty. Hereditary titles and honors 
are few in China. Nine-tenths of her officials come 
.from the middle class, raise themselves by merit and 
superior mental power. 

Tsi An by imperial decree has ordered that China 
shall have a Constitution, a Parfiamentary Govern- 
ment. What do you think of that? Is not China 
waking up? It is not to be this year, but just as soon 
as the suggestions that have been asked for from 
every class can be collated and analyzed and put in 

[ 141;] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

form. The material is ready, and within five years 
China will be measurably self-governed. Oh, that 
old Tsi An is a great woman. She reads the times, 
and China is today a thousand years ahead of Russia 
in the intelligence of her lower classes and the virtue 
of her higher. 

Well, I did not intend to talk Chinese politics here. 
I will do that when I go to Shanghai, which is the 
Copeland County of China. 

We descended once more to the city. We saw the 
City of the Dead, a beautiful place, where the better 
class are kept till their tombs are ready, or sometimes 
till transport can be had to their native tombs. We 
saw the great Mandarin coffins hollowed from a 
single log of teak or cherry, beautifully polished, 
and before it the ever-burning joss-sticks and the rice 
and flowers. And we saw the Water Clock. Ever 
hear of it? I, did when I was at school some sixty or 
seventy years ago. I think it was an illustration of 
hydrostatics or biology; I don't remember now. It 
is in a lofty tower over the principal street of the city. 
A stone receptacle permits four drops of water a 
second to fall into a stone tub, in which there is a float 

[142] 



CANTON 



with a brass graduate fixed to it. As the water fills 
the lower tub the graduate rises and marks the flight 
of time by hours. Every two hours the attendant 
sets out a great announcing-board, with the hour on, 
and Canton's two millions take their time and appoint 
their tasks by that. For six hundred years this simple 
mechanism has ordered the daily life of the Cantonese. 
But like the Buddhist gods, its day is done. Every 
store has an American clock, nearly every household. 
Here, as elsewhere, 'Hhe old order changeth." 

And finally, after pricing more jades and things, 
we left Canton for the Shameen, the English concession 
on an island, separated by a narrow canal from the 
old city. There we found an 'English hotel and dis- 
missed Ah Kow and the coolies. For myself, I 
crawled into a hot bath, tried to soak off the heat- 
blisters, doped myself with talcum powder, got into 
my pajamas, and on the wide cool veranda of my room 
sought to forget my troubles. 

Certainly I deserved a martyr's crown. If, when 
I reach the Pearly Gates, St. Peter shall ask me what 
conspicuous thing I have done to deserve admittance, 
I shall promptly answer, '^I shopped all day in Canton 
without cussing once." That ought to get me in. 

[143] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

Job is a back number. He may have deserved some 
celebrity in his time, but I have taken his place. I 
ate my dinner as nearly as possible in the costume of 
our First Parents, and was happy. Captain C. of 
one of our gunboats called on us, and we had a de- 
lightful hour with him. AMiat a cracking fine set of 
fellows our naval officers are! They are about all 
that save our face in the Far East. People that can 
turn out such big, clean-limbed, well-set-up, clear- 
headed chaps as they must amount to something, so 
the foreigner thinks ; and he is right. They play too 
much poker and drink too much whisky, but so do 
most people out here. But their ships are the pret- 
tiest, trimmest, best kept, their jackies are the finest- 
looking, and the Old Flag is the most beautiful ban- 
ner the winds ever blew. It makes you choke up 
and get kind of lumpy in your throat when you see it 
above one of our big white ships out here. It stands 
for so much, and if you have any piety in you you 
thank God you were born an American. 

Well, we sat on our veranda and watched the water- 
faring folks of Canton, — another city, by the way. 
There are two million people in Canton. It seems 
incredible, for from the great five-storied watch-tower 

[144] 



CANTON 



on the city wall you can take it in at a glance, but 
they are there, and there is another million who are 
bom, live and die on the water. They swarm like 
flies, and breed about as fast. They live on their 
boats. They never touch foot to the ground save on 
necessary business. The land folk do not intermarry 
with them. Ah Kow says, '^They are low people, 
very low." They are a pariah caste. They navigate 
the vast internal system of water-ways that intersect 
this part of China with innumerable shallow ducts. 
They supply Canton with food and take away its 
products. They carry fowls and pigs on their boats, 
they are homes and shelters for them, and there they 
marry and breed, live and die. I think I said there 
were no wheeled vehicles in Canton, nor outside that 
I saw. You strike not even a country cart till you 
reach Shanghai, where you first see the one- wheeled 
Chinese barrow built for the two-foot roads, the only 
ones China has. Every particle of food and drink 
for two millions of people, all they use, wear, work 
with and manufacture, and all the offal and garbage 
of a great city, are carried in and out on the backs of 
men and women. All they consume and produce 
and throw away is 'Hoted." 

[145] 



THE. FAR EAST TODAY. 

One thing I learned in Canton, and that is to do 
without water on a hot day. All that boiling day I 
drank nothing, except some tea at tiffin. Do not 
smile — there is nothing stronger than tea to be had 
in Canton. The water comes from wells, that are 
little better than sewers. No one but a Chinaman 
could drink it and live. This old, old land, swarming 
for thousands of years with a teeming population, 
is infected, every inch of it, with the feculence and 
decay of humanity. More than that, night-soil is 
the universal fertilizer here. Not a particle is wasted. 
There are no sewers. All is carried out by coolies 
to be spread out on the land. It follows that Euro- 
peans do not eat Chinese-grown vegetables. In fact, 
Dr. Strong, head of the Philippine biological labora- 
tory, assures me that lettuce in the Far East is pos- 
itively deadly to a white man. No one eats it. Talk 
of bacteria — you can't get away from them here. 
Naturally, epidemic diseases are as common as a cold 
at home. Wherever Europeans locate they organize 
their own settlements, with a water-supply, sewerage, 
and garbage removal, and so they live here. Not 
one European in a hundred can live in a Chinese city. 
Thousands of years of it have some way fortified the 

[146] 



CANTON 



Chinese constitution to it ; they are in a way immune. 
In Manila even, no one drinks anything but distilled 
water. An American city that used Canton water 
would have a perennial epidemic of typhoid, but the 
Chinese do not. They have the bubonic plague, the 
Black Death of the Middle Ages, most of the time, but 
it seldom affects Europeans. Cholera occasionally, 
typhoid very seldom. 

Well, I was talking of the water life of Canton. 
One of its features is the Flower Boats, where girls are 
bought for sale and entertainment. These boats are 
great barges with two- and three-story structures on 
them, beautifully fitted up in Chinese style. It is 
always cool on the water, and here dinners are given 
and flower girls sing and converse for the entertain- 
ment of the guests. These girls are bought when 
young, and especially trained to entertain men. They 
are taught to converse, to amuse, to sing. They are 
often bought as secondary wives by rich Chinese, or 
given as presents to placate a great official. One was 
sold for twenty-five hundred dollars gold while I was 
in Canton. They are slaves pure and simple, but it 
is gilded slavery, with no hardship, and according to 
their notions it is all right. I could tell some queer 

[147] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

stories I have heard about these boats, but this stuff 
has to go through the mails. Most of them come 
from the lower classes, but not necessarily. For 
instance, the other day the Governor of a province 
with an unpronounceable and unspellable name was 
assassinated while visiting a school, by its head- 
master and founder, a man of education and property. 
It was believed to be part of an anti-monarchical 
plot, for there is quite a party of that faith in China. 
The assassin was arrested two days later and instantly 
beheaded. His wife and daughters were sold into 
slavery, his two sons above sixteen decapitated, 
and his two younger sons made eunuchs for the royal 
palace. That is Chinese justice. 

By the way, I had nearly forgotten the Execution 
ground where Cantonese criminals are beheaded. It 
is a long, narrow inclosure, in ordinary times a pot- 
tery. When there is head-chopping to be done the 
pots and shards are set one side and the official ex- 
ecutioner does his work. We met him, a placid, 
benign-faced, middle-aged man, who has himself be- 
headed more than a thousand men. Think of it ! — as 
many as thirty criminals have been decapitated there 
within an hour. When there is a big batch it takes 
[ 148^1 



CANTON 



several headsmen. Ah Kow explained that it was 
^^ belly hard work, make him plenty much tired;" 
that about four was the limit of a day's work for one 
executioner. The victim is forced to kneel, a man 
pulls the queue forward to expose the neck, the short 
sword falls with a drawing motion, and the head rolls 
on the ground. They never bungle it as they did 
with Sir Walter Raleigh. It is clean-cut and artistic. 
Last September the thirty-one Kow Shing pirates 
were beheaded there, and this narrow strip of ground 
has soaked the blood of thousands. You see we are 
back in the Middle Ages here. Piracy still flourishes. 
A month ago a band of them seized an English tramp 
and looted her, but let the crew go. I have some pic- 
tures of there things that are very realistic. I may 
have the happy fortune to see one of these killings. 
In fact, if I were a big gun I should be sure to, for the 
Viceroy is a kindly man, and will have a couple of 
heads chopped off any time to gratify a distinguished 
visitor. 

Well, we watched the river-boats light up with 
Standard Oil kerosene, in lamps made in the U. S. A., 
and half the night they chattered and made it hideous 
with guttural noises. 

[ 149 ] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

My dinner tasted of Canton. It took me two days 
to get rid of the taste of those smells. They had 
soaked clear into me, and not till I reached the kindly 
shelter of the Boa Vista at Macao did I really relish 
my meals. We will go there next. 



[150] 



MACAO . 

" Gem of the Orient earth and open sea, 
Macao, that in thy lap and on thy breast 
Hast gathered beauties all the loveliest. 
Which the sun shines on in majesty. 

"The very clouds that top each mountain's crest 
Seem to repose there lovingly. 
How full of grace the green Cathayan tree 
Bends to the breeze; and now thy sands are prest 

"With gentlest waves that ever and anon 
Break their awakened furios on thy shore. 
Were these the scenes that poet looked upon 
Whose life, 'though known to fame, knew misery 
more'?" 

How many people know where Macao is? I had 
heard the name vaguely. I knew that it was some- 
where in the East, and that Camoens wrote there the 
''Lusiad/' the only great poem by a Portuguese. As 
soon as I left San Francisco and began to get ac- 
quainted on the ship, I heard of Macao. ''Don't 
fail to go to Macao.'' ''Why?" "Because it is the 
gambling-hell of the East, the unique gambling es- 
tablishment of the world." 

That was all— just the gambling. No one who men- 
tioned it seemed to have observed that it is one of 

[151] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

the most beautiful spots in the world, an old Portu- 
guese town, that was a well-built city before James- 
town was thought of ; that it marks the first European 
settlement in China; that it has nearly every ad- 
vantage possible of situation, climate, and quaintness. 
That is the way with travelers: we most of us see 
but one thing, the aspect that attracts and interests 
us. There is an East-Indian story of three beggars, 
born blind, who desired to know what an elephant 
was like. So they were led up to an elephant. One 
of them happened to grab the elephant by the tail, 
and exclaimed, ''Why, an elephant is just like a rope!" 
The second had butted into his side, and he asserted 
that an elephant was exactly like a brick wall ; while 
the third, who found his trunk, declared that an ele- 
phant w^as shaped like a serpent; and they fell to 
blows over their opinions. 

Most people go through the world blind or half- 
blind. They see but one thing out of many, one side, 
one aspect. So these men who talked to me had 
seen the gambling side of Macao, nothing more. 

We left Canton in the morning to take the river- 
ride by daylight, through vast fields of rice, a busy 

[152] 



MACAO 



river, filled with junks, sampans and steamers, with 
innumerable creeks and water byways leading off in 
every direction, and at four o'clock came in sight of 
the rocky island of Macao. From the river or an 
estuary of the sea — for it is all tide-water here, clear 
up to Canton — it is a rocky islet, some five miles long 
and a half-mile wide. There are three high hills, 
one of which is crowned with the first lighthouse ever 
built on this coast, the middle one with the old cit- 
adel, that in its day resisted two attacks from the 
Dutch and many from pirates, and the third by a 
magnificent hospital, just below which stands our 
hotel, the Boa Vista. At first sight its beauties are 
hidden, but when I stood on my veranda at the Boa 
Vista, at the very extremity of one horn of the four- 
mile crescent, and saw at my feet the tiled roofs and 
many-hued fagades of this old Iberian city, older than 
any in America, the crescent sweep of golden sand, 
backed by the sea-wall, the wide Praya, the exqui- 
site gardens, the noble hills, the enchanting vistas, 
the soft Old- World charm that broods over it, I for- 
got about the gambling and what I came to see. 
Macao the beautiful is enough. F. says that only 
Naples is more beautiful. A. says that it lacks 
[153] 



THEFAR EAST TODAY. 

but little of the beauty of Nice, and its situation is 
much like both. So you may take the word of these 
gadabout ladies that Macao is one of the gems of the 
world. Its history is curious. I have no books of 
reference at hand, and I may get my dates mixed, for 
I got most of it from the Portuguese manager of the 
hotel, whose English is as picturesque as his island. 
I know enough Spanish to read Portuguese signs, and 
I was reminded of the story of the old lady who was 
bragging of her son. She said he went to Portugal 
and studied Portuguese for three months and could 
speak it as well '^as any Portugoose in the lot." 

In the early part of the sixteenth century, I think 
about 1520, two Portuguese sailors from a shipwrecked 
vessel floated to this island. They stayed here and 
won the confidence of the Chinese. Portugal was 
then at the height of its power and brief glory. Its 
daring navigators and hardy sailors were the first to 
round the Cape of Good Hope and open the first sea 
route to the Indies. They established trading sta- 
tions throughout the East, at Goa and elsewhere, 
and brought the stuffs, the silks, the ivories, the spices 
and gems of the East to Lisbon. The trade was 
enormously remunerative. For nearly a hundred 

[154] 



MACAO 



years Lisbon was the entrepot of the Eastern trade 
for all Europe. Of course others followed, the Dutch 
particularly; but Portugal was the first. She speed- 
ily followed the discovery of these shipwrecked sail- 



1 
ors. 



Macao is in the center of the great delta of the Pearl 
and West rivers, admirably situated for trade with 
the great city of Canton, to which they were also the 
first Europeans to be admitted, and they very speed- 
ily obtained a cession of the island, built there a fair 
city, named it Macao, and strongly fortified it. Within 
thirty years they had established factories up and 
down these rivers, with their capital at Macao, and 
when Camoens was sent here, about 1560, it was then 
a considerable town, well built in Portuguese style, 
with a well-ordered government, a strong force of 
soldiers, and a gallant and polite society. Here 
Camoens wrote the greater part of the Lusiad, which 
has been translated into every tongue, and remains 
the only important Portuguese contribution to the 
literature of the world. When Portugal was absorbed 
by Spain, the destructive genius of Philip Second of 
Spain, he who lost the Netherlands by his bigotry, 
joined to the power of the Inquisition, reduced the 

[155] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

Portuguese to impotence, destroyed their energy and 
initiative, and other nations speedily wrung from 
them their trading-posts in the East. But through 
it all they held Macao with a death-grip. The Dutch 
attacked it twice in the sixteen-forties, but were 
beaten off. England has occupied it twice, to keep 
the French from taking it when Portugal was too 
weak to hold it, but from the traditional friendship 
between the two countries returned it, and it remains 
today Portuguese ruled by a Portuguese Governor, 
policed by Portuguese soldiers, their last, lone out- 
post in the East, the monument of a 'Mying nation'' 
that bade fair once to outstrip Spain in colonial con- 
quest. 

Strange tales these old walls could tell of fierce 
conflicts, where the gallant soldiers of Old Portugal 
in morion and breastplate fought the swarming 
Chinese pirates, or stood off the sturdy Dutch. To- 
day the Chinese have reentered and taken their own. 
Portugal's trade is gone. The Chinese have it all, 
and there are some eighty thousand of them on the 
island. They make silk and cement and cigars; they 
gather here the products of these rich valleys in their 
native boats for the big world's steamers at Hong 

[156] 



MACAO. 



Kong, just below. They have everything save the 
nominal lordship of the island. A Chinese syndicate 
has the gambling concession and the lottery, the big- 
gest in the East, the one that Taft drove out of Ma- 
nila. The lottery pays the Portuguese ten thousand 
dollars a month, and the gambling-house pays a 
thousand dollars a day for its license, besides the tax 
on its property. These sums run the city — run 
it as no other city in the East is run except Manila. 
It is beautifully clean, swept and garnished every 
day, well policed, healthy and salubrious. In fact, 
it is the summer resort for all this coast. It is always 
cool here, even when it is sweltering at Hong Kong. 
The cool wind always blows, and in the winter fires 
are grateful, but every sort of tropical vegetation 
flourishes, and I have never seen such gardens. The 
garden of Camoens is the sweetest spot in the Orient. 
His ''grotto," where he wrote the Lusiad, is on a hill 
back of the official palace of the Governor, formed by 
a great rock, imposed by nature upon two granite 
plinths where the sun never enters, but the cool 
breeze always blows from the sea. Here is set a 
splendid portrait bust of the Immortal, surrounded 
by tributes in a half-dozen languages, engraved on 
[157] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

stone tablets, one of which, by Dr. Bowrig, in English, 
heads this article. 

The hilltop has been landscape-gardened till it is a 
dream. Winding paths beneath the shade of the 
Cathayan tree, the bamboo, the pumeloe, the baobab 
and the banyan turn and retreat, cool and shaded, 
with here a glimpse of the sea and there of the land or 
the town. On the very crest, nature has made a 
natural platform, from which you can see the whole 
island, and here is a great stone summer-house, so 
old that a banyan tree a hundred feet high has com- 
pletely encircled it with roots, and even penetrated 
every crevice, and slowly disintegrated the solid stone 
and cement. The banyan is the most curious tree in 
the world. It grows upside down or any way. A 
little tendril starts from a bough far up the tree. 
Apparently it intends to be a bough, but it may change 
its notion, start downward, and, wrapping around 
the trunk in bewildering convolvuli, become another 
root; or it may drop straight to the earth, there to 
strike root and start another tree, part and parcel 
of the parent. So the aged banyan becomes a whole 
forest in itself. Its leaf is beautiful, its shade dense, 
and its vagaries unendingly interesting. 

[.158 ] 



MACAO 



Long we lingered in that enchanting spot, sur- 
rounded by every beauty that nature and art con- 
joining can give, and all so old that the cement walks 
are clothed in long green moss, the marble balustrades 
wrapped and enfolded in the embrace of trees that are 
centuries old. A riot of greenness and bloom and 
fragrance, strange shapes and stranger flowers, a 
Mediterranean garden set down here in Asia. 

There is the beautiful Praya, a road along the sea 
backed by houses of every color and architecture. 
Here it is Spanish with latticed balconies. There a 
front that is purely Greek, another with Moresque 
columns and sharply pointed arches. They are or- 
ange and cream and brown and green, softened by 
time to a chromatic harmony. 

There are great public gardens, beautifully kept, 
where the band plays at six o'clock and everyone rides 
out to show himself. And then back to the Boa 
Vista, the best hotel in the Orient, built and run by 
the government, where we had the best meals I have 
tasted since we left God's country. It stands two 
hundred and fifty feet above the water, with terraced 
grounds dropping to the sea, as I have said, at one horn 
of the island crescent. At night, when the town is 

[159] 



THEFAR EAST TODAY. 

illuminated and rises in broken galleries, each with 
its lights, it is almost unreal in its beauty. Its only 
fault is it is too stagey. You expect the curtain to 
drop and show you where to buy shoes and where to 
get your supper when the show is over. 

Of course we went to the gambling-house, which, 
as I have said, is unique. In the first place, it never 
closes its doors. The game runs day and night the 
year rounds and the '^chairs never get cold." It is 
the only house in the world where there is no limit, 
high or low. You may bet five cents or ten thousand 
dollars. Any bet is accepted, and cashed if you win. 
It is the only gambling-house where the bank has never 
been broken. Somewhere within its labyrinths is 
money enough to meet any sort of a run of luck 
against any table. There are eighteen tables in the 
house, all about alike, and fantan is the only game 
played; and by the way it is nearer on the level, is 
the squarest bank gambling-game I ever heard of. 
The room is large, with a long table, about which are 
seated some thirty Chinese. There is an upper gal- 
lery above the table where most foreigners go; so 
that it is really two stories. There are two croupiers 
and a cashier for each, at opposite ends, and one dealer. 

[160] 



MACAO. 



Surely it is a curious sight. As we seated ourselves 
in the gallery where we could look down on the table, 
a boy handed me a Manila cigar and a plate of water- 
melon seeds, which every one munches as the play 
goes on. Next to me sat a fat Portuguese v/oman, 
who was playing hundred-dollar bills from a roll big 
enough to choke a cow, and winning. Next to her 
was a Chinese woman with her two daughters. All 
of them smoked cigarettes constantly and kept tab 
on the winning numbers, occasionally venturing a 
small bet. On my left was an aged Chinaman, with 
a keen, aristocratic face, who smoked a water-pipe 
and watched the game, but was not playing. Below 
were old men and young, gray and bearded merchants 
and boys not out of their teens, high castes and coolies 
touching elbows in their devotion to the Blind God- 
dess. The croupier at my end was a gigantic China- 
man with an . enormously fat stomach, naked to the 
waist, and glistening with perspiration. The one at 
the other end looked like a death's-head, with long 
fingers like talons. Back of each is the cashier, with 
great piles of silver and stacks of bank-notes, which 
no one is allowed to approach. No money is left on 
the table. Your money is tossed to the cashier, who 

[ 161J 



T H E F A R EAST TODAY. 

stacks it up and the croupier represents your bet b}' 
brass counters placed on the number you choose. 
Before each cashier is a card six inches square, each 
side of which represents a number from one to four. 
You can play a single number; if you win, you get 
four to one. You can play a combination of any two 
numbers, and if one of them wins you get two to one- 
You see the odds are exactly even. The bank gets 
eight per cent out of every bet ; that is all, but it is 
enough. That steady drain of eight per cent in the 
long run gets it all. It is like the ''kitty" at poker, 
which will in time absorb all the chips. 

Each player has before him a tablet and pencil, on 
which he records the fall of the numbei"s, and each 
apparently tries to play a ''system" of his owti. You 
hand your money to the boy, '"'one dollar on the two 
and fom-." He throws it into a basket hmig from a 
string, and with a dexterous flirt drops it before the 
cashier and sing-songs m Chinese your numbers. 
The croupier, apparently without looking at it, throws 
it to the cashier and drops bra^s counters on the num- 
bei's. ^Vhen the bets are numerous, he spreads out 
little short slips of ivory, whh your bet on the proper 
numbers. Sometimes the brass counters cover a space 

[ 162 ] 



MACAO 



two feet square. There are twenty or thirty bets be- 
fore him, but he never makes a mistake. There is 
never a dispute. His big fat fingers seem to have an 
inteUigence of their own. He picks up a stack of 
brass counters, running his finger down the stack with- 
out counting, and sets the exact number down. 
Finally the bets are made. The dealer picks up a 
handful of brass discs, each with a hole in it, and 
throws them on the table, fifty or sixty, covers them 
for a moment with a brass cup, and then with a pointed 
stick begins to draw them out, four at a time. He 
separates four from the pile, with a swift certain 
movement spreads them so that everyone can see 
that he has drawn out just four, no more or less. 
Again he draws out four, until only four or less are 
left in the pile and the number left represents the win- 
ning number. If four remain, four wins. If you 
have bet on the four you get four times your bet, 
less eight per cent; if you have bet on the two and 
four you get double, less the bank's eight per cent. 
But the marvel of it is when the settlement is made. 
The cashier tosses out the cash for each bet, with 
lightning rapidity and absolute certainty, computing 
and deducting the bank's percentage from thirty dif- 
[163] 



THE. FAR EAST TODAY. 

ferent bets, ranging from ten cents to a hundred dol- 
lars, the croupier verifies the amount, apparently 
with his fingers. In a moment the table is cleared, 
everyone paid, and the game begins over again. So 
there is the game of fantan, the simplest, squarest 
gambling-game ever invented. There is no chance 
for anything but a square deal, no dealing-box or 
hold-out or crooked roulette wheel. Its fairness 
appeals to everyone, and people come here from all 
over the East to gamble, as they go to Monte Carlo. 
English and Americans from Hong Kong run over 
and spend Sunday, ostensibly for a rest and to cool 
off in this delicious air, but they sit up all night and 
day to play the game. We saw them coming in rick- 
shaws to catch the five o'clock boat, having sat in 
the game till the last minute. Four friends of mine 
came over Saturday night, and I figured out that be- 
tween them they dropped about five hundred dollars 
Mexican. But in the main it is the Chinese who 
support the game. They are said to be the most 
desperate gamblers in the world. They gamble away 
all they have, and finally sell themselves into slavery 
to pay their gambling debts. They gamble away 
their wives and children, but the Romans used to do 

[164] 



MACAO 



that, and I think the American Indian is about as 
bad. That reminds me : I used to know an Indian, 
Jim Buttermilk, who lost his squaw in a curious way. 
He was playing poker with another Indian, and was 
about broke. Finally he picked up a big hand and 
bet his squaw on it before the draw. The other In- 
dian promptly saw his bet and raised him two squaws. 
Jim had only one squaw and couldn't call the bet. 
Had to lay down his hand. 

Coming over on the ship the Chinese in the steerage 
were gambling all the time, with cards, dominoes, 
dice, and curious little black and white beans. I saw 
a punkah boy in Hong Kong pulling the string that 
sways the punkah fan with one hand, and gambling 
with three other boys with the other. None of them 
were over ten years old. 

But after all, gambling is universal; every race, 
white, red, brown, and yellow, gambles and has gam- 
bled from the beginning of time with every sort of an 
implement and on every sort of a chance. Everyone 
remembers how the Prince of Wales, afterwards 
George the Fourth, lost eighteen thousand guineas 
on a ten-mile race between a flock of turkeys and a 
flock of geese. The Prince backed the turkeys, each 

[165] 



THEFAR EAST TODAY. 

to drive his own birds. His opponent put up a brace 
game on the Prince. He selected five o'clock in the 
afternoon for the start. The turkeys romped away 
from the geese, but when sundown came the turkeys 
went to roost and no amount of poking could get 
them down. The geese, who sit up all night, kept on 
and won. 

Billy S. tells of a friend of his who came out West 
and lost seven thousand dollars playing croquet. I 
do not vouch for the truthfulness of the story or of 
the author. In fact, I think it improbable, but not 
at all impossible. For there is the school-teacher in 
Alton who lost twelve thousand dollars playing slot 
machines, and had to go to the poorhouse. The 
Associated Press sent this out, and the A. P. always 
tells the truth, except when it reports Roosevelt. 
This story sounds improbable. In the first place, 
how would a school-teacher get twelve thousand dol- 
lars unless he broke into a bank? And again, if he 
had twelve thousand dollars, why would he teach 
school? He would be like the Tennessee mountaineer 
who conceived the idea of buying a sawmill to cut up 
his timber. He wrote for prices, and the firm offered 
him a first-class sawmill for four thousand dollars 

[166] 



MACAO. 



cash. He wrote back: ''Mister, if I had four thou- 
sand dollars cash, what in the name of God would I 
want of a sawmill?" 

The element of time might at first preclude belief 
in this story, but here is a fact that I know myself. 
Every one in Avalon, Catalina Island, knows ''Uncle 
John." He has money to burn, and his favorite way 
of burning it is on slot machines, — not for money, but 
drinks. A certain saloon in San Francisco, which I 
shall not name, because I am not paid to advertise 
it, has framed and hanging on its wall a written 
signed and sealed acknowledgment that it owes Uncle 
John sixty thousand seven hundred and some odd 
drinks, won out of its slot machines. Uncle John 
doesn't care for the drinks; his friends are slowly 
but surely working out the debt, but he just likes the 
game. 

So the school-teacher story may be true. 

Buck O'Neill, of Arizona, once bet his amethyst 
mine against a Prescott hotel on the Corbett and 
Sullivan fight, and won, but the hotel people welshed, 
and refused to pay. 

Two friends of mine were in Chicago once, both 
devotees of the National Game. They went to the 
[167] 



THEFAR EAST TODAY. 

theatre, and one of them picked up a dollar bill that 
some one had dropped. When they vvent out they 
stopped in for a drink. The man with the dollar bill 
handed it to the barkeeper, and when he got to the 
door found he had four dollars and seventy-five cents 
in change. The barkeeper had mistaken it for a five. 
They decided that they were ahead of a bar for once, 
and they would stay so. On the street they decided 
that it was ^4ucky money," and went to a faro bank 
to try it. They won forty-four dollars with it, and 
quit. Then one of them, who was a horseman, de- 
cided that it was still ''lucky money," and that they 
w^ould go to the old Garfield race-track, then run by 
Corrigan, and chance the whole of it on the longest 
shot they could find. They went out and there was 
Bucephalus, we will call him, odds fifty to one. They 
decided to put their money on him. Just then a race- 
horse man who knew them came along and talked 
them out of it. He convinced them that B. couldn't 
win unless all the other horses dropped dead, and 
so they finally put their money on the favorite. Be- 
hold! — ^there was a bruising start. The horses were 
half an hour at the post. The thoroughbreds wore 
themselves out scoring, and the plug romped home 

[168] 



MACAO 



with the money. If they had stayed by their luck 
that casual dollar bill would have converted itself 
into twenty-two hundred dollars in twenty-four hours. 
No wonder those who fool with games of chance are 
superstitious. 

The lottery here is the biggest thing in the East. 
It pays a capital prize of twenty thousand pesos, ten 
thousand dollars gold, is drawn every month, and its 
tickets are sold all over Asia. It flourished first in 
Manila, and when Taft drove it out of there, it re- 
moved to Macao, where the Portuguese will let any- 
thing in that has the price. I should judge that this 
is a real ''wide-open town." But the proprietors of 
the gambling-house, who pay three hundred and 
sixty-five thousand dollars a year gold, insist on a 
monopoly. No one else can skin suckers but they, 
the duly licensed. You wonder where the money 
comes from, and what the total business must amount 
to when eight per cent pays this enormous tax and 
big dividends. 

I lost one dollar and eighty cents Mex. just to pay 
for my entertainment. I never thought I could beat 
the other fellow at his own game. It is curious that 

[169] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

none of these foreign games have ever taken root in 
America. Nothing flourishes there for any length of 
time but the native game of draw poker, probably 
because it requires more sense to play it than any 
other. Any fool can play baccarat, rouge et noir, 
roulette, or any of these foreign games, but it takes 
a knowledge of human nature, nerv^e and skill to play 
the National Game. It has gone everywhere, and I 
find that it is everywhere considered the king of games. 
The high-class Chinese play it, and play it well. The 
English try it, but none of them play well. 

Speaking of poker, a friend of mine has a curious 
theor}^ of economics. Many pohtical economists 
claim that the measure of prosperity in our country 
is the price of pig-iron. AMien pig-iron is high, times 
are good, and vice versa. Others say it is the price of 
wheat. The Bryan school used to say it was the 
price of silver; that if we wanted to make times good, 
all w^e had to do was to boost the price of silver by 
Free Coinage at the Heaven-Born ratio. My friend 
claims they are all wTong. Says he : " The true meas- 
ure of prosperity is the price of a white chip in the 
poker game." "Now," he says, ''I remember along 
in 1890 when Benjamin Harrison of blessed memory 

[170] 



MACAO 



was President; the price of a white chip at the Cope- 
land Hotel was twenty-five cents, and a good demand. 
Everyone was busy, times were good, labor employed, 
factories running ; in short. Prosperity with a capital 
P. Then we got to running off after false gods. We 
elected Grover Cleveland President. The country 
went to the bowwows, till after four years of the 
Stuffed Prophet a white chip in Topeka was worth 
only five cents and few takers, — practically no de- 
mand. The white chip rose and fell with the coun- 
try's business, or rather the business rose and fell 
with the white chip. Now," says he, ''look at it. 
This past winter in Topeka a white chip was worth 
from fifty cents to one dollar, with a good demand, 
and the market closed strong, say about March 15th, 
with every prospect of a good demand and higher 
prices." 

There may be something in my friend's theory; 
we may yet live to see Dun and Henry Clews publish- 
ing tables from the various cities of the United States, 
showing the ruling prices for white chips instead of the 
present deceptive "price units." 

Macao is a lovely place, fair and sweet and clean, 
entrancing but for this Devil of Gaming. In the 

[171] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

hands of the Enghsh or the Chinese it would be 
stopped, but Portugal is too poor to foot the bills; 
she has lost her grip. With a certain measure of 
pride in her past gloiy she still clings to Macao with 
its romantic histor}^, and makes of it a plague-spot, 
a snare and a pitfall for all the fools in the East. It 
should be the summer resort of this coast ; with its 
fine hotels, its splendid climate, its beauty and bloom 
and fragrance and charm, it should draw the best from 
Singapore to Madivostok, instead of which, it draws 
the worst. It preys upon all classes, sucks the blood 
of the rickshaw cooly indifferently with that of the 
rich and high-placed. It battens on vice and ruins 
its votaries, yet sits in beauty and smiles across the 
summer seas a true siren to lure men to disaster. 

Our time is up. The ''Nippon" is loosening from 
her buoy. Our Hong Kong friends are there to bid 
us good-by and drink a stirrup-cup, and we are off 
once more. The ship somehow seems lonely. Ah 
Wing, our dear, faithful Ah Wing, quit the ship at 
Hong Kong, and v>'e have a new cabin-boy, but we 
miss that China boy sorely. The English Colonel has 
gone southward to his fever-ridden camp in the 

[172] 



MACAO. 



swamps of Rangoon. Dr. Strong and his wife have 
gone on their long trip on the Roon to Berhn, where 
he is a delegate to the great International Congress of 
Medicine, — a worthy delegate, I assure you, for that 
new colony of Manila to send. The worst of this trip 
is the partings. We have made so many dear friends 
on the trip, made them only to lose them, to meet 
and part, friends we would like to live and die with. 
I shall be glad, how glad, to see the old ones again, 
for after all they are best. We have reached the limit 
of our journey. From here we shall be moving to- 
ward home, a little nearer every day; it sounds good. 



[173] 



SHANGHAI. 

This is the Paris of the Orient. It is the largest 
foreign settlement on the coast, the best built, has 
the best shops, and is the center of a vast trade. It 
lies on the Whangpoo, a creek that flows into the 
Yangste twelve miles below, and thirty miles from 
the ocean. I call the Whangpoo a creek, but it car- 
ries the deepest ships that float, and has a land- 
locked harbor twelve miles in length. 

It is a '^Settlement." That is to say, it is owned 
by China, not by any foreign power ; titles come from 
the Chinese, but it is governed by the foreigners them- 
selves. Twice England had a chance to have secured 
absolute title to it, but let the chance slip. England 
owns Hong Kong ; here she is only a settler, along with 
Germany, France, and America. Each has its con- 
sular court, and in addition both the American and 
British have regular courts and judges, the process 
running in the names of the respective countries, 
and ours is known as the United States Court for the 
District of China. Controversies between Americans, 
[174] 




CHEAP PIETY. 



SHANGHAI 



or Americans and Chinese, are settled in our court. 
It has many manufacturing interests, among them 
the largest flouring-mill in the East, and has an im- 
mense foreign trade. This morning's shipping news 
shows fifty-one ocean-going steamships in harbor, of 
which, by the way, twenty-eight are British. Brit- 
ain has not lost her ownership of the sea yet, though 
the Germans are making terrific inroads on her. You 
may take ship here direct for New York, for all the 
South-American ports, including Buenos Ayres, for 
Genoa, Marseilles and London, for Manila and Aus- 
tralia, — in fact, to nearly every deep-water port in 
the world. It has two English newspapers — papers, 
let me say, not newspapers; I cannot grant the title 
of newspaper to any English publication. I believe 
that if an Englishman were to open his morning 
paper and find anything less than three days old, the 
shock would be fatal. 

Your Englishman likes his news like his game, a 
Httle bit ''high," a trifle tender and smelly under the 
wing. For instance, take a paper like the London 
Times. There is a change determined on in the Min- 
istry; some one is going out, some one coming in. 
The Tiines will announce in a guarded way, that such 

[:i75] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

a change is impending, '^a-namin' no names." The 
next day it will state ''on the highest authority" 
that the change is not to be in the office of Home Sec- 
retary. The next day it will state ''from a source 
that cannot be questioned" that the change is not 
to be in the office of Foreign Minister. So by a pro- 
cess of elimination it will lead up to the fact, break 
the news gently, and finally, after its readers are 
fully prepared, after every one knows all about it by 
word of mouth, it will tell the fact and the Horrible 
Truth will be revealed : likely Second Assistant 
Private Secretary to the Under Secretary of the 
Board of Trade, or something equally as important. 
So an English daily is a series of essays, a weekly 
paper issued in daily installments. English papers 
out here are no exception to the rule. But they 
ought to be gold mines, for they are nine-tenths ad- 
vertising. If they get anything for the ads., life 
ought to be one Long Crimson Sunset. 

Take, for instance, the North China News, one of 
the most important and influential papers in the East. 
It is a twelve-page, seven-column paper. The first 
page is wholly ads. ; so is the second, the third, the 
fourth, and the fifth. Not a line of reading matter 

[176] 



SHANGHAI. 



on any of them. Finally, on the sixth page, at the 
bottom of the last column, you strike a 'deader." 
A heavy, solid editorial, finely written, on some cur- 
rent topic, that runs over onto the seventh page and 
takes up about two columns. Just one — no editorial 
paragraphs at all. On the seventh page is one brief 
column of cable news, mostly unimportant, another 
of Native Affairs, one of Notes and Comment, clipped, 
and two or three columns of correspondence, i. e., 
communications, — for the True Briton has a heaven- 
born right to exploit his grievances in the public 
prints. Then there is a lot of dull stuff from the 
courts. They print the most unimportant law suits 
with a wealth of detail that would put the New York 
papers on the Thaw trial far in the rear. They tell 
all the judges say, and the witnesses, and the law- 
yers, and the full text of the judgment. It saves 
brain-fag for the editor. And finally on the ninth 
page will be another essay, clipped from some Eng- 
lish weekly paper, some two months old. Some- 
times there is a column of clippings from American 
newspapers. Altogether there are, out of the eighty- 
four columns, just thirteen of ''pure reading matter," 
of which only two columns can be classed as news. I 

[177] 



THE. FAR EAST TODAY. 

could run that daily with one hand, and without any 
assistants whatever. The advertisers don't seem to 
care about being ''positioned." Very few of them 
are next to ''poor reading matter." (That was a slip, 
but let it go that way, — it is poorer than it is pure.) 
Their ads. are all lumped together anyhow, jumbled, 
not classified, and the worst written ads. ever. No 
attempt to attract attention or boost their goods. 
"Messrs. So-and-So beg to announce that they have 
just received a consignment of Blank's Baby Food." 
That's all. They remind one of the small boy whose 
father sent him down town to sell a bag of sweet 
corn. He came home with the com unsold. His 
father asked him why he did not sell it. "Darned 
if I know," said the boy; "two or three people asked 
me what I had in my bag, and I told them it was none 
of their business." Their goods are there, you ought 
to know it, and they wait on you as though they were 
doing you the greatest favor in permitting you to buy 
any of their justly celebrated stuff. We w^ouldn't 
call it advertising at home, but it goes out there. 

By the way, speaking of newspapers, Manila has 
two, or rather three — ^two evening and one morning. 
The American is morning, the Times and Cable even- 

[178] 



SHANGHAI 



ing. The American and Times are owned by the 
Speyers, who built the street railway in Manila and 
are trying with considerable success to get a first 
mortgage on the Islands. The Cable News is owned 
by its editor, who is the Bill White of the PhiUppines. 
He is always raising hell about something, and with 
considerable success. People out there seem to rely 
on it more than the corporation-owned American 
and Times. While I was there they were bluffing 
each other over which paid the most cable tolls for 
foreign news. Offering to put up one hundred pesos 
to back their claims, all of which sounded very fa- 
miliar; but as a matter of fact I could pay the 
monthly cable tolls of both of them without strain- 
ing my letter of credit much. Most of their cables 
are faked, guesses that have to be denied later. 

There are two Shanghais. Old Shanghai, an an- 
cient walled city, native, pure and simple, that is a 
thousand years old ; and there is what we think of as 
Shanghai, which consists of the various foreign set- 
tlements. The former was held by the Taiping 
rebels in 1860 for nearly a year, but they were wise 
enough not to disturb the foreigners, and it is much 

[179] 



THE. FAR EAST TODAY. 

like Canton. We spent a forenoon there, saw the 
sights, smelled the smells, and as before, I was sick 
for a day; couldn't eat anything that did not taste 
Chinesey. Curious how that smell gets into me. My 
very clothes seem to breathe of it. I have to come 
home, take a hot bath, and change everything. I 
like the Chinese individually, but in the mass, in their 
own environment, I had rather meet a family of pole- 
cats. However, we did our duty; F. looks after 
that. If I overlook a bet on the table in this matter 
of sight-seeing it will not be her fault. It is queer, a 
little fragile woman that can't sweep a floor without 
breaking down will take a big husky man and wear 
him to a frazzle when it comes to ''seeing things." 

F. has priced everything in China so far, and if she 
thought she had overlooked a piece of jade or a dress 
pattern she would start over again. Every morning 
when I am figuring on having a nice quiet forenoon 
to sit down and talk to ''Gentle Reader," I am re- 
minded of something we have not seen. It is exactly 
like four million other things we have seen, but it 
must be viewed just the same. 

One thing I did get in Shanghai : I was prayed for. 
It cost me twenty cents Mex., and the High Grand 

[180] 



SHANGHAI. 



burned a bunch of sampans made out of silver tissue 
paper and kowtowed before an extremely ugly god, I 
think the ugliest one in the bunch. I wonder if that 
was a compliment to my appearance? I did not want 
to, but F. said it was the thing to do ; it might bring 
me luck ; the guide said it would. You can't afford 
to overlook the chance of getting luck for ten cents. 
F.'s religion is taken from her environment. In 
Rome she had the Pope bless a rosary, and she treas- 
ures it devoutly. Out here she never overlooks a 
temple or joss-house if she knows it. In Japan she is 
Shinto, in France Catholic, in England Established 
Church. Somewhere out of the bunch she ought to 
get a Hereafter ticket that is properly punched. 

But old Shanghai is Canton in little. Streets three 
to four feet wide, tiny shops, everyone working at 
some trade, and everything massed by occupations. 
The fan-makers are here, the jewelers all together 
yonder, furniture-makers in another place. It is 
not so bad till you strike the streets where they pre- 
pare and vend the food; then. Heaven help you! 
The same innumerable population massed and 
crowded. I have tried to account for this terrific con- 
gestion in the China cities. Originally it was probably 

[181] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

to escape robbers and pirates that infested the open 
country, but it is mainly the enormous price of ground 
rent. As in all old congested countries, and this is the 
oldest and most congested, land is almost unpurchas- 
able. Streets and wide spaces, public gardens and 
breathing-places cost too much. Rents are enor- 
mous, and must be subdivided to the last limit, by pil- 
ing up. 

So, as I have said, you have never seen China Town 
in America, because there they move into streets that 
we have laid out, houses we have built. You don't 
get the Chinese atmosphere. That escapes, while 
here it is carefully retained so that you get all of it, 
mostly through the olfactories. The foreign part of 
Shanghai is beautiful. It flows down both sides of 
the Whangpoo, which is crossed by numerous bridges, 
splendidly built, with structures that would be a 
credit to any city in the world. 

Here we struck friends. F.'s sister has been out 
here for sixteen years and her husband has been here 
twenty-eight years, one of the oldest residents among 
the foreigners. I find that the longer foreigners have 
lived here the more pro-Chinese they are. They 
seem to stand acquaintance. Our people get used 

[182] 



SHANGHAI 



to them, like their ways, swear by them. The Doc- 
tor has a Number One Boy that has been with him 
for twelve years, who runs the whole house. By the 
way, there are no head waiters in this country. 
Everything goes by number. Number One Boy 
runs the dining-room. There is Number One Hall 
boy, porter, and so on. They even carry it into 
business. I heard one man speak of another as hav- 
ing been his Number Two for three years. Those 
who have been here long insensibly fall into ''pidgin." 
They all use it. For instance, I heard one English- 
man ask another, ''What fashion pidgin b'long that 
chop dollar face man?" That sentence requires 
rather a long explanation. "Pidgin" is as near 
"business" as the Chino can pronounce it. When 
the foreigners came here, they were not allowed to 
land ; they dealt over the side of the ship. The for- 
eigner could not learn Chinese, and the Chinese showed 
their adaptability by inventing Pidgin English; that 
is. Business English. It is the Lingua Franca, the 
Esperanto of the coast, and all nationalities use it in 
business. "Chop" is trade-mark, seal, or stamp. 
There is a great deal of trouble with Chinese coinage. 
A smart viceroy finds his profit in setting up a mint 

[183] 



THE. FAR EAST TODAY. 

and debasing the coinage, and no one will take a 
silver dollar unless it has the "chop" of some reliable 
house on it to show that it is full weight. They for- 
merly used a steel punch, and when a house handed 
you out a dollar in change it was punched with their 
"chop" to show that they guaranteed it to be good. 
Some of the old Hong Kong dollars were hammered 
all out of shape. They were "chop dollars." A man 
with pockmarks on his face is a "chop dollar face 
man." Now they use a stamp and indelible ink. 
When it wears a little or is indistinguishable you 
demand a fresh chop on it. "What fashion pidgin" 
is what kind of business. Everything is "piece." 
"My wantchee one piece glass." You never say 
here or there. You say "My wantchee you this 
side." "Topside" and "bottomside" are upstairs 
and down. The servant came to the Doctor at lunch. 
"Master hab got two piece men bottom side." Two 
visitors downstairs. 

Anything to eat is "chow." "Chopchop" is 
quickly, hurry. There is nothing like it except rail- 
road slang in America. Coming out, I was reading 
the verbatim account of the evidence of a Santa Fe 
brakeman who was called on the carpet to explain 

[184] 



SHANGHAI 



the circumstances of a rear-end collision. Here is 
what he told the ''Super.": ''You see it was this 
way : The hoghead was down greasin' the pig. The 
tallow-pot was in the coal mine crackin' diamonds. 
The Head shack was out front bending the rails to 
head in. The Con. was back in the dog-house tossin' 
the tissues, and I was just starting out with the red 
when she bumped us." 

If you can't translate that, maybe Jim Hurley will 
volunteer an explanation. He and Jerry Black talk 
that kind of language all the time. It is astonishing 
how few words you can get along with. There are 
not to exceed one hundred and fifty words of " pidgin/' 
but they suffice. If you know them you can do busi- 
ness all over the East. Mark you, it is "pidgin Eng- 
lish," not pidgin German or anything else. Enghsh 
is the tongue out here, in spite of the fact that the 
Germans are everywhere, patient, aggressive, work- 
ing tooth and nail for the trade and getting it. They 
have beaten us, they are beating the English, but to 
work here they must speak English. There are Chino- 
English schools in every coast town. Everywhere 
you meet Chinese who speak Enghsh, even in Canton. 
Many have learned it in America or Australia, but 

[185] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

most in these schools. In the Camoen Garden at 
Macao we met a charming Chinese family, the grand- 
father and grandmother, the married daughter, and 
four children — three handsome boys and a little 
girl that set F. crazy, she was so pretty and sweet. 
All of them except the old man spoke English, the 
boys fluently. A knowledge of English insures a 
good job in a store or bank, an ultimate partnership. 
It is the language of the Coast. 

I shall not try to tell you much about the Chinese 
language, although I know all about it — nit. No 
one knows anything about Chinese except a few 
scholars who have put in their lives on it. Their 
writing is ideographic ; go to the dictionary for that. 
They have one dialect, called the Mandarin or offi- 
cial tongue, spoken by most of the educated classes, 
and there is another dialect for nearly every province. 
Lack of intercommunication has led to dialectism, 
as it does everywhere, as it did in England and France 
two hundred years ago, and even in America. A 
Canton Chino cannot understand a Shanghai. Doc- 
tor San, our pet name for the ship's doctor, can reel 
off a jargon with no sense in it that sounds exactly 
like some sort of Chinese. I saw him go up to a Hong 

[186] 



SHANGHAI. 



Kong Chinaman and rattle it off. The boy Ustened 
attentively, and finally said, ''My no sabbe Shang- 
hai," and walked off. He thought the doctor was 
talking the northern dialect. 

Men who come out here get completely weaned 
from home. They get fits of homesickness and go 
back, but they almost invariably return. Kipling 
says: ''When you 'ear the East a-callin' you won't 
never 'eed naught else." It is so. Somehow it 
draws men back. Those who stay here any length 
of time become expatriates. They are loyal to their 
country, they celebrate the Fourth of July, the Fall 
of the Bastille, or the King's birthday, they sing Die 
Wacht am Rhein, the Marseillaise, or the Star- 
Spangled Banner, when they get full, but they stay 
here. 

For one thing, they are waited on hand and foot for 
a trifle. They can live in style here on what would 
be a beggarly income at home. They can keep a 
houseful of servants — servants for everything — be- 
long to the best clubs, keep horses, never touch foot 
to the ground, for a sum that at home would hardly 
suffice a department clerk. Major J., who was in the 
Indian mutiny, a boy of sixteen, who has been here 

[187] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

forty-seven years, said to me: ''I'd like to go 'ome, 
don't you know, but my little screw keeps me in 
comfort 'ere; at 'ome I'd be a beggar." 

Office hours are 10 to 12, an hour at the club, an 
hour and a half at tiffin. Then from 2 : 30 to 5, work ; 
then golf or cricket or polo till 7 : 30, and dinner at 8. 
That is the life. I have found very few that wanted 
to leave it, to go back to the strenuous life, the hus- 
tle and worry of home. The English have set their 
mark indelibly on all this countr}^ The leisurely 
ways, the mode of doing business, are English, modi- 
fied to still more slowness by the Chinese they deal 
with. As soon as there are a dozen English in a 
place they start a club. They have cricket, golf, 
polo if they can afford it, for that is expensive. Here 
they have the Shanghai Club, a splendid old build- 
ing, with a great librar}% rooms and rooms full of 
books in every tongue. They have golf, cricket and 
polo clubs, with beautiful grounds almost in the heart 
of the city. They have a country club on the Bub- 
bling Well Road that is one of the finest in the world, 
with a theatre for amateur performances and grounds 
that are a dream. Every one knows every one. It 
is a city with a charming dash of the country town. 

[188] 



SHANGHAI. 



The overpowering pressure of the Asiatic Shadow 
draws them very close together. French or Eng- 
lish, German or American, they are White Men. 
They fight for the business, but they stand by one 
another in everything else like members of a secret 
order. There is a fellowship of the White Man out 
here that we know nothing of. All up and down the 
coast they know each other. They are so few, this 
little fringe of AVhite Men clinging to the Yellow Man's 
flank, a white speck in the yellow, a mere atom in 
Asia's uncounted millions. But they are strong men. 
Most of them have faced perils we know nothing of — 
for always there is a yellow peril here. They hate us, 
these Chinese, not individually, but in the mass. 
We mean their National degradation, we are the sign 
of their weakness, we have trampled them under foot. 
We forced the Son of Heaven to show his face, to 
give audience to the Foreign Devils. We have taken 
their best seaports, their most fertile lands. We have 
compelled them to try their lawsuits in our courts, 
submit to judgments from an alien judge. We have 
beaten them over and over again with insignificant 
numbers. We have desecrated their tombs, heaped 
indignities upon them. Why should they not hate 

[189] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

us? Very slowly they are beginning to realize where 
they have failed. That given the Open Door they 
must adopt our ways, our guns, our ships, must do 
business in our way. Today China is seeking to build 
up a navy, wants to repurchase from England the 
''lease" of Wei Hai Wei, the best port in the North. 
They are drilling troops everywhere, buying arms, 
establishing a regular soldiery. The Taiping Rebel- 
lion showed what they could do if drilled and led. 
Gordon showed that even the Cantonese would fight 
if they had weapons and confidence in their officers. 

The loot of Pekin was the last blow to the old re- 
gime. The attack on the foreign legations was the 
last despairing effort of the Reactionaries. When 
seventeen thousand foreign soldiers marched through 
the heart of the North, stormed Pekin, looted the 
palace and drove the Emperor to seek shelter in the 
West, even Tsi An, conservative of conservatives, 
yielded. 

From a taxable standpoint China is poor. Given 
an income of one hundred thousand dollars a year, 
divided among ten men, there is a taxable surplus. 
Divide that among one thousand men, and not much 
remains to be taxed. So it is in China. The wealth 

[190] 



SHANGHAI. 



is enormous, but so subdivided, so split up, that no 
heavy rate of taxation can be endured. It is rich, 
but the wealth is so widely held that it does not yield 
much. Even now, when China is determined to stop 
the opium traffic, enforcing the prohibition of opium- 
smoking everywhere, she is checked by the inquiry 
of the foreigners whom she owes: ^^If you stop the 
importation of opium, which pays a big tariff, how 
will you pay us?" 

That is all that checks the Yellow Peril. Japan is 
poor, poor beyond belief. Every import duty is 
pledged. Even the revenues from the state-owned 
railroads and the tobacco monopoly are mortgaged, 
and everything is taxed to the last limit it can bear. 
It would not be borne but for the wonderful patriot- 
ism of the Japanese, who place country first of all. 
The Chinese have not come to that yet, but they are 
coming. My cabin-boy. Ah Wing, one day unbur- 
dened his heart to us, and he is a Chinese Patriot. 
He reviled Li Hung Chang bitterly. Said that he 
was a boodler who gave up to Japan, sold Korea for 
gold. He said ^' China much big country, big coun- 
try on map. Hab got much men. Japan little 
country. China give up to Japan. Li bad man. 
[191] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

Plenty bad man. Sell China to put in his box." Li 
left a fortune of fifty millions, and started a poor 
boy who took the examinations and secured a small 
place at the outset without friends or family to help 
him. 

China, like Russia, is the victim of her officials. 
Just the other day one of the Imperial Censors was 
suspended because he had accused a member of the 
Council of accepting a present of ten thousand taels 
(about $7500) from a Viceroy, and the present of a 
singing-girl from a Governor, to overlook some of 
their transgressions. Later the Censor was justified, 
and the Viceroy and Governor degraded. There is 
no system of taxation in China. The Taotai of a 
city receives no salary. He wrings what he can from 
his people, gives what he must to the Imperial Treas- 
ury, bribes the necessary officials to let him keep the 
rest, and the whole system is one of corruption and 
graft. 

The Imperial Household is always hard up. There 
is no money to buy guns and ships or set China on its 
feet. Yet the country is rich, and with a fair admin- 
istration of finances would soon have a surplus. It 
is far richer than Japan, that in forty years has built 

[192] 



SHANGHAI. 



up a great armament on land and sea and fought two 
successful wars. It lacks the Strong Man, the Man 
who shall come, like the Mikado of Japan, surround 
himself with men like Ito and Togo and set this peo- 
ple on their feet. 

The worst blot on the Chinese civilization is their 
treatment of women. From Confucius down, their 
writings belittle women. They are kept in absolute 
ignorance, learn nothing, know nothing. A Chinese 
husband cannot get any pleasure out of the society 
of his wife, and hence seeks the singing-girls, who are 
educated to converse and amuse. It is considered 
degrading for a woman to be informed, to know how 
to talk, to be on an equality with man. All her use 
is to bear sons. Even this is changing, however. 
That these customs are not immutable, that China 
can move, is shown in the gradual disuse of foot-bind- 
ing. You rarely see a young woman with distorted 
feet. They are usually elderly women. A great 
society in China started by foreigners, but now 
mainly led by Chinese women, has all but put a stop 
to it. There are schools for girls in all the coast and 
river towns, and the school-master is abroad. With 
the gradual elevation of women will come the most 

[193] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

radical change in Chinese hfe. Now it is a gross im- 
propriety to ask a high-class Chinese about his wife 
or daughters. You may inquire of his sons, but you 
must not mention his women. Polygamy is allowed, 
but under restrictions. If the first wife bears a son, 
there is not often a second; but if rich, he may buy 
slaves. If the first wife is barren, or has only daugh- 
ters, he is permitted, nay, required to take a second 
or third. He may take, as a fact, just as many as he 
can support. But the first wife is always the head 
and others are only secondary. Their rights in the 
house, in the family estate, are always much lower 
than those of the first. She contracts the marriage 
of the sons, no matter whether they are hers or another 
wife's. Tsi An was a secondary wife of the Emperor, 
but her wit and cleverness enabled her to assume 
the position of Empress Dowager. She is It, no 
doubt of that. There is a great surplus of females 
in China. There are about five per cent more girls 
than boys born each year. Female infanticide has 
been of the commonest, open. Attempts are being 
made with some success to stop it, but provision must 
be made for the surplus girls. Even the slave market 
and polygamy do not provide for them. 

[194] 



SHANGHAI. 



Not many years ago, the Doctor was hunting, up- 
country, and in a pond found the bodies of two new- 
born female infants. He called some coolies who 
were near by. They knew who put them there; 
told the doctor, but justified it. '^Him b'long much 
poor man, belly poor. Hab got five, six. No can 
catch chow, what can do? Must go to pond." It is 
a great mass to start moving after its long lethargy, 
but it is beginning. Lack of intercommunication, 
isolation into separate provinces, lack of a common 
tongue, have prevented the growth of a real national 
feeling. Patriotism as the Japanese imderstand it. 
is unknown. But even that is awakening. The 
repeated encroachments of the foreigners, the injus- 
tice with which China has been treated, the contempt 
which foreigners show Chinese here in their intercourse 
with them, is slowly arousing a national feeling. A 
desire for the ability to resent, to defend themselves. 
To show how China is treated: The other day the 
Hague Conference was discussing some additions to 
the rules of ci\dlized warfare. The Chinese delegates 
timidly suggested that they would like to have the 
rules of war applied to '^expeditions." That is what 
we call it when we send a force into China to punish 



[195] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

her for some despairing outbreak against us. The 
other delegates promptly replied that this could not 
be done, as these expeditions were punitive, intended 
to punish China for some dereUction, some infringe- 
ment on foreign rights. It did not seem to occur to 
them that war usually comes from the same caase. 
But the request was refused. So it will still be law- 
ful for civilized troops in China to do as they did in 
the Pekin expedition — to ravish women, desecrate 
tombs, steal private property, in short, disregard 
every rule of civilized warfare. 

Shanghai is the center of all the disaffection against 
the reigning family. There are many native papers 
printed here that circulate throughout China. All 
of them are progressive, most of them incendiary, 
but the Government cannot touch them here. If 
a Chinese reformer is close pressed, he flees to Shang- 
hai and is safe. It is the Switzerland of the East. 
So the city is full of agitators, reformers and revolu- 
tionists. Of course they are the ablest men in the 
Empire, and China is doing what Prussia is trying to 
do, drive out every man of intelligence and initiative. 
But there is no Siberia for China, and as I have said, 
[196] 



SHANGHAI 



even in this, China is ahead of Russia. The throne 
admits that there are grievances, hstens to memorials, 
has a Board of Censors to ferret out corruption and 
injustice, and seems to be making an honest effort to 
better the system. Yesterday it was again announced 
that China is to have a Constitution very soon, and 
the provincial governors were urged to make haste 
in the preparations for it. Well-informed foreigners 
expect to see a radical change in the Government 
within five years. They are in doubt, somewhat 
fearful as to the effect on their own position here. 
They know they cannot hold these concessions an 
hour in the face of awakened China. If China should 
reorganize her army and make an alliance with Japan 
she would be able to dictate terms. The conserving 
influence is Japan. But you may set this down: 
there will be no more encroachments on China. The 
last piece of her ground has been alienated. 

Everyone realizes the vast potentialities of trouble 
that exist out here. Emperor William was not far 
wrong when he painted the picture of the Yellow 
Peril. But I do not personally think the Chinese 
will ever become aggressive, or however strong they 
may become, wage a war of conquest. All they ask, 

[197] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

all they hope for, is to be strong enough to secure 
justice for themselves, and they know it cannot be 
had without an army and navy as counsel for their 
side of the case. Every effort is being made now to 
preserve the status quo. Nation after nation is bind- 
ing itself to preserve the territorial integrity of China 
from further spoliation, and at the same time keep 
the slice it has secured. Every one deprecates a 
war. No one wants the Yellow Man to wake up and 
find his strength. The admission of Japan to the 
family of nations, the conspicuous part it is taking 
in the Hague Conference, are disquieting enough to 
Europe. She wants no more. The great body of 
the Chinese, the educated class, which comprises 
almost a majority of its population, are honest and 
just. Given a constitutional form of government 
that would secure to the nation this great body of in- 
telligence, and China need not be feared. She will 
deal fairly with the foreigner in affairs of state as 
she does now in private business. 

I have written somewhat at length of these things, 
as I found all conditions out here so different from 
my preconceptions. It is all so new to me that I 
have thought it might be new to others. 
[198] 



SHANGHAI 



We have given up Pekin. I am told that the smells 
there are even worse than those of Canton. I have 
enough. I am looking forward to Japan, for which we 
sail tomorrow. Here is a dull uniformity of shaven 
foreheads and pigtails that makes all faces look aUke. 
A stereotyped costume that wearies the eye. Narrow 
streets, sullen faces, a great shadow that hangs over 
It all. They are so incomprehensible, so mysterious, 
these Asiatic minds. The oldest residents tell me 
that after thirty years' intercourse, there are Chinese 
points of view they cannot find, depths and recesses 
of the Chinese mind they cannot understand; at the 
last they remain strangers. I feel at every step an 
alien. I can understand the French, the Germans, 
the European peoples. I can joy in their joys, share 
their sorrows, sympathize with their misfortunes, 
enter, though briefly, into their lives. Here, I am 
wholly excluded. I know that I do not penetrate 
below the surface. I can never hope to know them, 
nay, though I traveled from Tonkin to the Great 
Wall. I should simply see more millions, who con- 
stantly evade my inquiry. I hke to get to the bottom 
of things. I like to feel that I know; that I can be, 
if only for an hour, a part of the people where I am.' 

[1991 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

I vroiild fain be one of them wliile I am with them. 
It cannot be here. I am tu*ed, utterly tired of the 
Celestial Kingdom. I shall never see it again. I 
would not live here for the mines of Golconda. But 
in Japan I feel at home. The ^-ide streets, the gar- 
dens and flowers, the kindly smiling faces, the ex- 
quisite courtesy from high and low, the variety and 
multifonn charm of that people, draw me irresistibly. 
They are not as honest as the Chinese, and presently 
I shall give you a reason for that ; and it is only tem- 
porary', born of peculiar conditions, it is not racial, 
but I feel as though I could live and die with them and 
be content. 

I look forward to seeing them again as one looks 
forward to some delightful entertainment. Yester- 
day I saw a Japanese woman on the streets tottering 
along in her narrow kimono, her clogs and her white 
stockings, and I could not forbear an ''ohayo" to her. 
She twinkled into a smile and made me her funny 
Japanese bow, and I felt as if I were home agaia. 

Before I leave Cliina, however, I want to say some- 
tliing about the character of this most strange peo- 
ple as I have obsers'ed them, studied them, and 
[200] 



SHANGHAI. 



learned of them from men who have spent the most 
of their hves here. To the Occidental they are a 
bundle of contradictions. They are the most honest, 
industrious, and most temperate people in the world. 
I believe I mentioned that in Canton, a city of two 
million people, there is not a drinking-place, a saloon, 
a grog-shop, or a drug-store with a back room, or any 
place where anything intoxicating can be procured. 
That is true of old Shanghai, true of the native part 
of Hong Kong, Macao, and Plankow. The higher 
classes drink, very moderately, a rice wine, a kind of 
brandy that they make, and in the coast towns 
European drinks, but always in moderation. The 
lower and middle classes drink not at all, except tea. 
A drunken Chinaman would be as much of a curiosity 
as a Chinaman with two heads. There is no need of 
temperance societies here. 

They are very charitable, giving freely of their 
means to relieve the poverty and distress of their 
poorer countrymen. After the San Francisco earth- 
quake China relieved the distress of the Chinese in 
San Francisco as promptly and even more liberally 
than we relieved the distress of our people. They 
are more kindly in the family relation than we. 

[201] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

Families live more harmoniously. Family ties are 
stronger. Filial duty is paramount, and in no 
country in the world is the family relation in all its 
branches held more tenaciously or more sacredly than 
in China. 

And yet they are a very cruel people. Their penal 
code is the most terrible in the world. Torture to 
secure a confession is still a part of their system. The 
lin-chi, or hewing in pieces as a public punishment, 
was abolished only a year ago. It was witnessed 
with apparent enjoyment by thousands whenever it 
took place. The victim was strapped to a pole, and 
the executioner with a sharp knife gradually dismem- 
bered him; first a hand, then a foot, then an arm 
at the shoulder, then a leg at the knee, and last of 
all the head, until nothing but a bloody torso re- 
mained. I have seen photographs taken on the spot 
of one of these executions, showing every detail of 
it: the executioner cheerfully pausing in his bloody 
work to let the photographer record the last step, 
and the photographs show a sea of faces surrounding 
the place of execution, apparently enjoying intensely 
the sufferings of the victim. Such things as break- 
ing a man's legs to make him confess, searing him 
[202] 



SHANGHAI. 



with hot irons and putting out his eyes, are still 
common. It is hard to reconcile these things with 
their general kindliness toward one another, the fine- 
ness of their family relations, their charity for poverty, 
and their many other good qualities. To the end 
of time they must remain an anomaly, an enigma to 
the Western mind ; but one thing should not be for- 
gotten: There must be something great in the 
Chinese race, something strong in its character, some- 
thing of wisdom in its governmental system, for China 
has existed as a nation, as a governmental entity, 
with practically its present boundaries and its pres- 
ent system, longer than any other nation or govern- 
ment has endured in the history of the world. Nor 
is it now decadent. On the contrary, I believe the 
Chinese to-day to be one of the strongest races in 
the world, a race whose greatest history is yet to come. 
In the intelligence, sobriety and industry of its vast 
population it is unsurpassed by any nation in the 
world. Given a decent government, the growth of 
a national spirit will follow and China will take its 
place among the great powers of the world; and it 
will be a power that will make for peace, not war, or 
territorial aggression. Profoundly interesting in 
[203] 



THE- FAR EAST TODAY. 

every way, historically, governmentally, ethically 
and otherwise is this great mysterious realm. 

Perhaps when I recover from the smells and for- 
get as one does the disagreeable things, I shall want 
to come back. Certainly I have never seen any other 
country as interesting in all its phases. 

F. and her sister have met, once more, to part again, 
perhaps for the last time. It will be a hard wrench, 
and it will be hard to think of them out here expatri- 
ated, living always under this Shadow, but they are 
content, and we cannot stay. 

To-morrow we turn Eastward, turn toward Home. 



l204 



JAPAN (Continued). 

Shanghai Hes fifty miles from the sea, and twelve 
miles from Woosimg, at the mouth of the '\'\Tiangpoa, 
which is really the port for Shanghai. The P. & 0. 
steamers and large w^ar vessels go clear up to Shanghai, 
but vessels which touch for but a day anchor at 
Woosung, on the Yangste, and a tender takes passen- 
gers and mails the rest of the way. ^Vhen our ten- 
der left the wharf there was a great crowd to see it 
off, the greater part of whose attention seemed to be 
concentrated on one man, a slight, bald-headed gen- 
tleman, manifestly embarrassed by the number of 
bouquets that were being handed up to him, and 
especially so by a terrific fusillade of gigantic Chinese 
fire-crackers that exploded just as we started. Natu- 
rally when they yelled ''A^Tiat's the matter with G.?" 
and replied enthusiastically that G. was all right, 
most of them with voices that indicated they had been 
up the night before, we wondered what particular 
High Grand Mr. G. was. Later we discovered that 
he was a nice, unassuming business man, an Ameri- 
can vvho had been out there fifteen years and was 
[2051 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

now going back to his native America, and this was 
the Far-East way of wishing him good-by. The de- 
parture of a white man out there, if he is a good fellow, 
leaves a big gap, very different from this country. 
When I returned from a three months' absence in 
Europe a friend met me and said, '^You've been away, 
haven't you? I haven't seen you for a week." Out 
there they are few, and they stick together. 

Possibly I have expressed my opinion of the China 
Sea before, but here it is again. It is stormy, foggy, 
full of unexpected currents, treacherous, and in color 
resembles discouraged dishwater. It is just as un- 
lovely as China itself. It is the dread of mariners, 
and no liner navigates it without an experienced 
pilot clear from Hong Kong to Nagasaki. Allien 
we started, a typhoon was loafing around the Loo 
Choo Islands, apparently laying for us, but we missed 
it. We saw the wreck of a big French warship that 
had run ashore in a fog, swept out of its course by one 
of these unaccountable currents. We were lucky; 
we missed the fogs and the typhoon, and once more 
saw the noble harbor of Nagasaki open before us 
with nearly as much pleasure as we shall feel when 
we see the Golden Gate. 

[206] 



JAPAN. 



We had expected mail here, but were disappointed. 
The barnacle who inflicts himself upon our consular 
service at this place had thoughtfully forwarded it, 
without orders, to Hong Kong, so that we shall now 
get it about two months' after we reach home. 

I learn from our newspapers that our consular serv- 
ice in the Far East is improving rapidly. Maybe 
it is. I am glad I did not have to do with it before 
it improved. It is an asylum for incapables now, 
filled with derelicts that various political storms have 
cast ashore, and picked up by a friendly administra- 
tion that seems to think our appointive positions are 
refuges for Congressmen, whom their constituents 
have rejected and political sub-bosses whom the 
bossees have kicked out. 

Once more we savored the pleasant odors of Japan, 
absorbed its kindly smiles, answered its funny bows 
and jigjigged over the hills and far away in our rick- 
shaws, and were happy. We did not linger at Naga- 
saki or Kobe. Old Japan was a-calling us, and we 
barkened to the call. We landed at Kobe in the 
morning, bag and baggage, and there was quite a 
lot of it, for the cheapness of beautiful things in China 
had tempted us a little, and my letter of credit was 

[207] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

considerably shorn by our stay there. When we 
reached the custom-house I told the officer that we 
were American travelers passing through Japan. 
That our stuff would be shipped through to Yoko- 
hama, with the exception of our smaller baggage. 
That if desired they could bond it for the Yokohama 
office. He replied that that was unnecessary, made 
a chalk-mark on each package, and we were free. 
Think of it ! — and Japan is a high-protection country, 
a stiff tariff on everything. How would an American 
custom-house official have treated such a request? 
With contempt, insolence and rudeness. He would 
have opened every package, tumbled everything out, 
kept us there half a day, and then permitted us to 
repack things ourselves. 

The U. S. Customs Service is the most exasperating 
in the world. Its employes make no distinction be- 
tween the traveler they know to be a professional 
smuggler, and the ordinary tourist. But the most 
absurd thing about it is the graft called the '^courtesy 
of the port." The Collector of the Port may in his 
discretion grant to any person what is known as the 
courtesy of the port, and the favored one's baggage 
goes through without examination. At Manila, Chas. 
[ 208 ] 



JAPAN 



H. Towne, of New York, one-time Senator from 
Minnesota for six weeks by virtue of a gubernatorial 
appointment to fill a vacancy, but for several years 
a private citizen, had the "courtesy of the port," 
and his stuff went through without examination, 
while my handbag had to go to the custom-house 
and I did not get it till the next day. 

Once in a while the lid comes off, and we get a 
glimpse through some exposure of the rottenness of 
our customs service, but the Treasury Department 
is always able to force it back on again before we get 
more than a glimpse. 

We left Kobe on the afternoon train that skirts 
the great bay of Kobe, and stopped for two hours 
at Osake to see a "modern" manufacturing town. 
Originally Osake was a beautiful old Japanese town 
seat of a once great Daimio, and renowned for its 
feudal castle. The hand of progress has touched it 
and turned it into a Packingtown, a Homestead, a 
Paterson, New Jersey, with all of their ills and none 
of their benefits. A great forest of chimneys marks 
the new cotton factories and iron mills. 

A smoky pall covers the city, and in place of the 
wide clean streets, gardens and villas of other Japan- 

[ 209 ] 



THE. FAR EAST TODAY. 

ese cities, we found rows of hideous tenements, rushed 
up like mushrooms, with corrugated iron roofs, hid- 
eous, unspeakable, true factory hives. 

It is the boast of these new textile mills that they 
can compete with the world, and some of them made 
last year as high as thirty-five per cent after paying 
enormous bonuses to certain directors. I should 
think they could. They employ main-y women and 
children, twelve hours a day, and at a wage that is 
simply inhuman. If child-labor is cheap in America, 
imagine what it is in Japan, where women tend looms 
for twelve hours for ten cents a day. I was told 
that children eight years old work twelve hours a 
day in these mills — there is no child-labor law here 
— for a wage of five cents a day of our money. 

We saw one of these mills, a familiar sight, just 
like America, but worse, — a vast room, filled with 
shrieking machinery, dust, odors, and uncleanness, 
poor light and less air, and amid these whirling 
spindles and hideous noises tiny figures feeding the 
remorseless machines, escaping death and mutilation 
only by care unceasing, bent, hollow-eyed, old before 
their time, — and all for a wage that would not sup- 
port a dog in decency. Oh, yes, '^ commercial su- 

[210] 



JAPAN. 



premacy" is a fine thing, a high-sounding phrase, 
but is it worth what it costs? Japan is reaching for 
it, and her rich men are playing the same game that 
EngHsh and American manufacturers have played. 
Demanding an enormous tariff for the ^'protection 
of Japanese labor," and themselves absorbing every 
penny of the protection, and grinding their employes' 
blood and nerves into huge profits. Old Japan was 
fair, beautiful, prosperous, contented and happy, 
but the demon of competition has entered. Am- 
bition demands a first rank with the world-powers, 
and so we have protection, manufactures, child-labor, 
hideous, unsightly towns, a few very rich and the 
great mass underpaid, underfed, vilely housed, drag- 
ging out a bare existence. 



KIOTO. 

We left Osake with relief and turned our faces to 
Kioto, to old Japan. One of the confusing things 
about Japanese railways is the fact that the names 
of the larger towns never appear on the time table, 
only the name of the station, which is something 
entirely different. Tokyo appears on the time table 
as Shimbashi, Yokohama as Kodzu, and so on. But 
[211] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

we were in no doubt at Kioto. The hotel at Kobe 
had wired the Kioto hotel that we were coming on a 
certain train, and we had our taste of a really Japan- 
ese hotel. At the station a little Jap dressed in Euro- 
pean fashion bustled into our compartment, touched 
his hat, and without a word grabbed our bags and 
handed them to a waiting porter. We followed him 
outside to a carriage, a low-hung, one-horse victoria 
with a driver in livery. He bowed and touched his 
hat. The moment we were seated he was off at a 
swift trot, with a long-legged boy in the hotel livery 
running ahead. The streets are so narrow that a 
boy always runs ahead of the carriages to warn rick- 
shaws at the intersecting streets. We drove miles, 
it seemed, through streets fairly wide, filled with 
traffic, all on foot, endless shops decorated and gaily 
displayed, till finally we entered a court-yard and drew 
up before the portico of a big stucco-front building. 

It was embarrassing. There stood the manager, 
the assistant manager, two or three clerks, the head 
waiter, seven or eight bell-boys, (girls, I mean; the 
bell-boys are girls here,) all the waiters, coolies and 
rickshaw men, at least twenty in all, all bowing and 
bobbing and kowtowing at once and sucking in their 

[212] 



JAPAN. 



breath for fear that an exhalation might offend our 
honorable noses. 

As an American citizen, accustomed to being 
bullied by the head waiter, ignored by the clerk and 
snubbed by every one about a hotel, it was flatter- 
ing; but, yes, it was embarrassing. Like George 
Washington and the negro, I did not want to be out- 
done in politeness by any Jap, and when anyone 
bowed to me I bowed back, but I had to give it up. 
Every time I looked at the clerk or the head waiter 
or a bell-girl or a cooly he bowed, and so I quit look- 
ing at them, I bowed three hundred and forty-one 
times the first hour, and then I quit. I concluded 
that I had done enough for politeness, and after that 
I maintained my American rigidity. 

They escorted us to a great room on the second 
floor ; I say escort, for our cortege comprised the en- 
tire office force, all the bell-girls, and part of the 
waiters. Our room was on the second floor, a cor- 
ner room, big enough for a family, beautifully fur- 
nished, and overlooking a delightful garden, filled 
with strange bloom and foliage, through which lazily 
meandered a clear little stream filled with gold-fish, 
with a toy bridge across it, a toy summer-house on 

[213] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

its bank and toy children playing in its bamboo bor- 
der. It was just like a scene from a Japanese fan, 
quiet, still, a touch of rus in urho that made it de- 
lightful. 

We went down and had a six-course dinner, the 
best I have eaten in the East except at the Boa Vista, 
exquisitely served, miraculous neatness everywhere. 
And now, before we go out for an evening's rick- 
shaw ride through this old city, a word about it. 

Kioto was the old capital of the Mikado, during the 
Shogunate and until its abolition in 1868. Here the 
Mikado lived in complete seclusion, never visible to 
his subjects, and surrounded by a semi-religious 
court; while the actual power and sovereignty were 
exercised by the Shogun, whose capital was Yeddo, 
now Tokio. 

Who was the Shogun? I shall not assume that 
my readers know more than I did when I went to 
Japan. I knew who the Mikado was, but the Sho- 
gun was a name unknown; so before getting any 
deeper into Japan, I shall tell you a little of Japanese 
history, enough to help an understanding of these 
people. 

[214] 



JAPAN. 



The Mikado is, as every one knows, at once the 
spiritual and temporal head of Japan. He combines 
in himself Emperor and Pope. He is head of the 
Church as well as of the State, and the two are com- 
bined in his person. He is more than Pope, how- 
ever. Devoutly believed to have descended from 
the Sun, through a direct and unbroken ancestry, 
he is in a sense a celestial being, a God-King. He 
is worshipped as well as obeyed. Of course this 
latter phase is wearing away with the introduction 
of Occidental ideas, and it is only in the remoter dis- 
tricts that the Mikado cult holds full force; but the 
fact remains that to his people, all his people, he oc- 
cupies a higher position than any other earthly po- 
tentate. To that is largely owing the fanatic devo- 
tion of his people, their unreasoning loyalty, their 
supreme courage in battle. 

Prior to the Seventh Century, the Mikado held the 
same position he now does, temporal and spiritual 
head. But Japan was not then a compact empire. 
It was split into clans, septs, each warring with the 
other, and there was but little central authority. 

About the last of the Seventh Century the powerful 
Fujiwara clan seized the temporal power, bent the 

[215] 



THEFAR EAST TODAY. 

other clans or broke them, and made of the Mikado 
the spiritual head, themselves absorbing all lay func- 
tions of government. 

From that on the Mikado became a mere puppet 
in the hands of this regency, akin to the Mayors of 
the Palace under the last Carlo vingian kings in France. 

The title of these military and civil rulers was Sho- 
gun. When the first Europeans came in contact 
with the Japanese, they heard only of the Shogun, 
but by a name that foreigners roughly spelled Ty- 
coon, and it was as the tycoon that we learned of the 
rulers of Japan when we went to school in the sixties. 

But the Shoguns not only made of the Mikado a 
spiritual figure-head — they deposed and set up Mi- 
kados when they pleased. Sometimes there were 
rival Mikados, set up by different powerful clans; 
for the Shoguns were unable to preserve order, and 
the country was the scene of innumerable civil wars 
for eight hundred years. The whole country was 
feudal; Daimios, or heads of clans, held their own 
fiefs, made war or peace with each other, adminis- 
tered justice, and largely ignored the central author- 
ity. This lasted till the country was desolate and the 
Mikado's court was left without revenue and often 
[216] 



JAPAN 



half-starved. The body of one Mikado lay at the 
gate of his palace for forty days before the money 
could be raised to pay the funeral expenses. 

Finally the strong man came, one Nobunaga, in 
1573, who subdued the clans and grasped the Sho- 
gunate. He died suddenly in 1582, and was succeeded 
by Hideyoshi, a great general, who fairly welded the 
country into one, and to purge the country of its 
turbulent spirits invaded Korea unsuccessfully. At 
his death, in 1598, he was succeeded by leyasu, the 
greatest man that Japan has eve'r produced ; in fact, 
one of the greatest men the world has seen. 

leyasu founded the Tokagawa Shogunate, which 
gave fifteen rulers to Japan in unbroken line, and 
lasted till 1868, when, under the stress of conflict 
with foreign powers, the old system broke down. 
The Shogunate was abolished, the present Mikado 
retook the government, and later gave Japan the 
constitution that it now enjoys. 

leyasu was a great general, a great lawgiver, a 
diplomat, a state-builder, a Csesar of the sixteenth 
century. He broke the power of the Daimios, limited 
the number of Saumurai or military class, enforced a 
wise system of legislation, redistributed the great 

[217] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

fiefs among his followers, and in addition, as a safe- 
guard against rebellion, compelled each Daimio to 
spend part of the year at the capital of the Shogunate 
which he established at Yeddo, and to leave hostages 
from his family always in the Shogun's power. 

He encouraged agriculture, made roads and canals, 
and so restored peace and order that Japan grew in 
wealth and population beyond anything ever known. 
Modern Japan is what leyasu made it. He left a 
testament, a code of maxims for his descendants, 
and a series of minute directions not only for the 
government of his country, but for its daily life, its 
social observances, its family relations; in short, a 
strait-jacket for every Japanese, that they have worn 
for three hundred years, till they have assumed its 
shape, and now that it is removed continue instinct- 
ively to imitate. 

Here is one of his maxims : 

''Life is like unto a long journey with a heavy 
load. Let thy steps be slow and steady, that thou 
stumble not. Persuade thyself that imperfection 
and inconvenience is the natural lot of mortals, and 
there will be no room for discontent, neither for 
despair. If ambitious desires arise in thy heart, 
recall the days of extremity thou hast passed through. 

[218] 



JAPAN 



Forbearance is the root of quietness and assurance 
forever. Look upon wrath as thine enemy. If thou 
knowest only what it is to conquer, but knowest not 
what it is to be defeated, woe unto thee! — it will 
fare ill with thee. Find fault with thyself rather 
than with others. Better the less than the more." 

One other thing he did that was destined to have 
memorable consequences to his coimtry. Prior to 
his reign the Dutch had secured a foothold at Naga- 
saki, had a trading station there, and were doing a 
lucrative trade. The Jesuits, reaching over from 
China, had established missions and made thousands 
of converts by tolerating Ancestor Worship and en- 
grafting Christianity upon it as they did in China. 
It was the time of greatest power of the Buddhists, 
before the decay of that religion, and leyasu himself 
was Buddhist as much as he was anything, but he 
was tolerant in religious matters. 

But his first aim was the unification of Japan, and 
he soon saw that the Jesuits aimed at nothing less 
than complete power. Just as he was making this 
discovery, Walter Adams, an English shipmaster, 
was captured on the coast by a local Daimio. He 
was taken before leyasu, who immediately took a 
fancy to this blunt English sailor, who knew the coun- 

[219] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

tries beyond the sea and particularly knew what the 
Jesuits were. Adams told him of the persecutions 
in Europe, of St. Bartholomew, of the Inquisition; 
and leyasu's half-formed purpose of expulsion hard- 
ened into a resolve. 

The Jesuits were expelled after a bloody struggle, in 
which at the last fifty thousand were surrounded 
and killed. Christianity was forbidden on the pain 
of death, and so thoroughly did he do his work, that 
no trace of it remained three hundred years later. 
Adams was never allowed to return to England, 
leyasu kept him there, married him to a native, 
made him a Daimio, and his tomb is to be seen just 
above Kamakura. 

With the expulsion of the Jesuits the Buddhists 
began to raise their heads and assert temporal powers. 
Many Daimios sided with them, and a short but bloody 
civil war followed. A Buddhist himself, leyasu did 
not scruple to storm a castle held by Buddhists and 
slaughter every one in it, including the priests. He 
taught them their lesson so thoroughly that it was 
never forgotten, and civil war in any guise never 
again raised its head in Japan. 

Considered as a state-builder, he ranks with the 

[220] 



JAPAN 



greatest the world has seen, for he took Japan, a 
scattered mass of clans and feudal sovereignties, 
owing no allegiance to the central power, weak and 
devastated by civil war, and left it welded into one 
nation, — strong, peaceful and prosperous, and so it 
remained. He restored the Mikado to his former 
state, and was scrupulous in observance of all the 
rites due to the spiritual head. 

Not to know of leyasu is not to know Japan or 
why it is what it is today. 

When the Shogunate fell, the Mikado transferred 
his capital to Yeddo, the old capital of the Sho- 
gunate, and renamed it Tokio, or ''Western capital." 

The transfer of the capital from Kioto was a severe 
blow, and for a time it languished and lost population, 
but it had strong men who organized, aided in the 
establishment of new industries and the rebuilding 
of old ones, and it is now a city of four hundred thou- 
sand, the seat of the finest bronze, silver, and silk 
workers in Japan. 

Well, our rickshaw has been waiting all this time 
and I must introduce you to Asole, who was our guide, 
counselor and friend throughout our stay. For fifty 
[221] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

cents a day apiece he and another hauled us from 
nine o'clock till ten at night, always ready, cheerful 
polite and knowledgable. Asole knows his Kioto 
every inch. He knows where the best and cheapest 
bronzes are to be had, the finest embroideries, the 
best ivory- workers. He was neat, tireless, soft- 
voiced, and good to look at. He had a bookful of 
recommendations, signed by many distinguished peo- 
ple, and I added my owm name with a fervent rec- 
ommendation which I here and now repeat. 

That first night he took us to a kind of street fair 
that was being held on an island in the river, where 
we saw the Japanese at play. Mind you, Kioto is 
as much old Japan as Canton is old China. We saw 
but four white people in the city, and they came from 
the same boat with us. It has never been altered 
or spoiled like the coast towns. 

Kioto streets at night are fairy-land. There are 
no electric street lights, but before each little shop 
hangs a huge paper lantern with the owner's name in 
gaudy colors on it, and so the street is a long vista 
of gorgeous, many-colored lights, bobbing and sway- 
ing in the night breeze. Every one is on the street, 
for these people work in daylight and shop and visit 

[222] 



JAPAN. 



and gossip in the evening. The streets are sufficiently 
wide, for the houses are never more than two stories. 
There is no noise of vehicles, nor horses or automobiles, 
just the click-clack of the wooden clogs, the swish 
of kimonos, the soft laughter and low voices of the 
passing throng. There is no disorder, no hurry, no 
quarreling, no drunkenness, no flaunting of silk side 
by side with rags. Every one is clean, neatly clothed, 
merry, smiling, cheerful. 

Every turn is a new picture, gay yet harmonious, 
sparkling, bewitching. Our rickshaws glide along 
on rubber tires, smoothly, noiselessly. Each house- 
holder sprinkles and sweeps the street before his own 
property ; there is no dust, no dirt, no smells. It all 
looks as though the curtain had just risen, the stage 
setting all complete, every actor in fancy costume in 
place. 

It is so charming it is unreal. It is not a workaday 
world, just a holiday playtime world. Even the shop- 
keepers seem playing at shop-keeping as they bow 
and smile and gossip v/ith their customers. And 
how much fun those little people get out of the spend- 
ing of a five-cent piece! They wander from shop to 
shop and admire and bow and chatter and chaf- 

[223] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 



fer, til] you wonder that they ever get anything 
bought. 

Finally we reach the fine stone bridge across the 
river. The quaint two-story houses with quainter 
balconies, covered with vines, all illuminated with 
lanterns, lean over the banks ; and far down the river 
you can see row on row of lights reflected in the clear- 
flowing swift water, and hear the sound of the samisen 
where the geisha-girls are entertaining visitors in the 
tea-houses that abound here. 

Below on the gravelly island is a great crowd, the 
Japanese Fair. It would take too long to tell of the 
attractions ; and sooth, they are mostly of American 
invention. There are three merry-go-rounds that are 
crowded all the time; cheap, as befits the Japanese 
purse ; a five-minutes ride for two cents. There are 
chariots for the elders and riding-horses hung from 
ropes for the youngsters, so hung that they can be 
made to curvet and rear in the most realistic way. 
One gallant young cavalryman, perhaps eight years 
old, made his steed prance and dance in a fearsome 
way, and hugely enjoyed our open awe and admira- 
tion. The Japanese family play all together. The 
man does not leave the woman to lug the children. 
On the contrary, he carries them himself, looks after 

[224] 



JAPAN. 



them, amuses them. They are good comrades and 
enjoy each other, and the mother totters along be- 
side them unburdened. 

There is no race suicide here. Every couple seem 
to have a quiverful. There is a shoot the chutes, 
"made in America." All sorts of dioramas, fortune- 
tellers, canes for ring-throwing, darky heads to throw 
a ball at — all American. In short, one wonders what 
the Japanese did for amusement before the American 
invasion. 

One of the funny things was a little circle like a 
circus-track, with four little ponies for riding. For 
five cents you could mount and gallop around this 
tiny circle ten times. It was very funny to see a 
Jap gather up his kimono and go bobbing gravely 
around the circle with the impression that he was 
learning to be a horseman. Horses are almost un- 
known in Japan, and they have never learned to ride. 
I am told that there is nothing much funnier than a 
Japanese cavalry regiment at its evolutions. No 
wonder they could outmarch the other troops on the 
road to Pekin. Shank's mare has been their con- 
veyance from the beginning, is now. They know 
what their legs are for, and how to use them. 

[225 J 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

Asole guided us, explained everything, translated, 
bought our tickets (for we went to everything), and 
when the show was over trotted us home in the soft 
night air, through the streets that were still crowded, 
though it was eleven o'clock. Occasionally a lan- 
tern had burned out and a shop-front was dark, but 
still the city was gay, gayer than in the daytime. It 
is Broadway in little about theatre-time. 

How much like home our hotel seems, with its 
cheerful welcoming faces, its soft-voiced courtesy, 
its prompt and willing service. How I loathed the 
thought of an American hotel after the ^^ Kioto." 

Of course the next morning the first thought of the 
feminine mind was shopping. We had letters to 
various shopkeepers from a big importing house that 
guaranteed us the ^^ lowest wholesale rates." Well, 
after vainly trying to buy things in these big stores 
where the prices are almost as high as in America, 
we committed ourselves to Asole. The big stores 
all have salesmer^ in the hotels, and wares displayed 
there. Beware of them. The hotel gets a profit on 
every dollar you buy. Asole took us to shops we had 
never heard of. Tiny places on side streets where 

[226] 



JAPAN 



the art of old Japan has never been defiled by foreign 
contact. We bought bronzes in a shop that has been 
conducted by the same family on the same spot, 
descending from father to son, for more than three 
hundred years. The front is undecorated; just a 
little sign. You enter a court, and then through 
room after room that would fill a collector with joy. 
I am often asked, when people examine some of our 
curios, "Were those made by hand?" My dear lady 
or gentleman, everything is made by hand in Japan ; 
that is, everything worth buying. They make noth- 
ing with machinery. In the past few years some fac- 
tories are turning out cheap imitations of hand-work 
with machinery, and that is what we often buy in 
this country as Japanese art, but in these old shops 
everything is made by hand. We saw them work 
and make those beautiful things, so different from 
our workshops. You go up a narrow stair into a 
long room that seems all windows, mostly open and 
looking out onto a charming garden, with a little 
waterfall and a bridge, some bronze storks standing 
about a fountain, lotus blooming in the pond, and 
wistaria just out of bloom, hanging its long tresses 
from a little pergola. 

[227] 



THE. FAR EAST TODAY. 

They are artists, each one, who signs his own work. 
Even a carven bamboo cane I have is signed by the 
artist who carved it. They will not work unless there 
are beautiful things about them. They cannot, nor 
will they, work unless they are happy, in tune with 
their work. 

No great painter is more scrupulous of his atmos- 
phere and his own spirit than these workmen. You 
could not get them to work under other conditions. 
Many of them are working here in the same room 
for the same employer where and for whom their 
fathers and grandfathers worked. 

This is not to be a treatise on Japanese art, but I 
want to tell of a few of the things. For instance, I 
saw a cabinet, perhaps five feet high by four wide and 
two deep, of the old gold lacquer, for which the owner 
asked ten thousand dollars. Six men worked on it 
for three years. This lacquer takes twenty-two pro- 
cesses before it is finished, and then it is good for the 
ages. Time and weather have no effect on it. I saw 
walls and walls of it in the Nikko temples that have 
been there for three hundred years, still fresh and 
glowing. I thought I had seen red lacquer in this 
country, but I was mistaken. The real red lacquer 

[228] 



JAPAN. 



is nearly as expensive as the gold lacquer. A small 
box was twenty dollars. A little tray ten dollars. 
But these are art treasures, and few of them go out- 
side of Japan. 

These old stores that Asole took us to cater to the 
Japanese trade almost exclusively. In many of them 
they had no English, for Americans never find their 
way there. They work patiently, slowly building 
up an art object that will last for all time, for people 
who know how much time there is. Time is no ob- 
ject if the end be attained. The master of the shop 
knows his workmen intimately. They work to- 
gether. Each workman feels for the honor of his 
house, and for no money would he slight a piece of 
work or do his second best. When he is ill, tired, 
worried, ''not happy," he quits till he is in tune with 
his work again. 

I think that Kioto, however, excels in bronzes. 
The variety is infinite, for no patterns are duplicated 
except by special order. And the prices on these are 
certainly very low compared with even inferior bronze 
work at home. I had at home a bronze globe for an 
electric hght. I bought one hke it, but better bronze, 
in Kioto for just one-fifth the Kansas City price 

[229] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

The place for silverware is Yokohama, and I shall 
describe that later. 

In the afternoon we visited some of the temples, 
and there are many in Kioto, but none of them com- 
pare with those at Nikko ; and I shall leave the tem- 
ple business for Nikko. 

One morning we went to the Geisha school, where 
three hundred young girls are being taught the art. 
The training of a geisha commences when she is six, 
and is kept up till she graduates at fifteen. They 
usually retire at twenty or twenty-three; in fact, 
they seldom dance after they are eighteen. 

We were shown over the school by the writing- 
master, one of the most charming gentlemen I have 
met in or out of Japan. He spent two hours with us, 
and when on leaving I ventured to offer a tip he was 
rather put out. 

We saw the whole thing. In one room they are 
taught to cut and make their own clothes; in an- 
other, to read and write. That was our guide's 
room. In another, to play the samisen, a long in- 
strument that looks like a half-log, with strings on 
its back, and the three-stringed lute. They are 

[ 230 ] 



JAPAN 



taught to sing to this accompaniment, and anything 
more excruciating than a Japanese song I have never 
heard. It is a high nasal of about four notes, with 
little slips and slides and quavers in the most unex- 
pected places, and apparently endless. One song, the 
guide informed us, was a love song, ''Oh, very pas- 
sionate!" It sounded Hke a tomcat on a moonUt 
night. 

But of course it was the dancing we came mostly 
to see, and we saw them all,— the Cherry Dance, the 
Dance of the Harvest Moon, the Dance of the Bam- 
boo, and so on. The cherry, plum, pine and bamboo 
are the four ''happy trees" of Japan, and there is a 
dance for each one, besides many others. It is not 
dancing according to our notions, just little steps 
here and there, posturings, and gestures, kneelings 
and bowings and genuflections. An ancient geisha 
who looked as though she might be a hundred sat 
in front and dictated each movement of the body, 
the eyes, the hands, the fan, and the little creature 
watched her with painful intensity and sought to 
imitate her. Sometimes it takes six months to learn 
a single dance, for every movement, every gesture, 
the movement of the eyes even, must be exactly so. 

[231] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

And then we had the tea service. We entered one 
of the Httle rooms and squatted oh the floor. An- 
other ancient geisha presided, and met us with bows 
that brought her forehead to the floor. She and our 
guide had probably met a dozen times that day, but 
they bowed three times to each other, clear to the 
floor. Then a girl brought in the tea and the service 
began. Understand, it is a rite. Every movement 
must be just so. From the teacup or bowl she takes 
a little cloth, dips it in a jar of hot water, lays it on 
a certain side of the cup, moves it three times around 
the cup, and lays it in a particular place. Then she 
bows to the company. Then she puts in the tea, 
bows, adds the hot water, bows, covers it for a mo- 
ment, bows, and then with a httle brush whisks the 
tea leaves out, and the tea is made. In receiving 
it from the attendant you should take it with both 
hands, shift it once around, and then drink it with 
a sucking noise, which denotes satisfaction. Some- 
times the girl would make a mistake: she failed to 
lay the hot- water dipper at the proper angle. The 
ancient geisha rapped sharply with her fan, and the 
girl started and changed it a fraction. This tea serv- 
ice has been handed down for hundreds of years, 

[232] 



JAPAN 



immutable, unchangeable, and it is the last and 
closing part of a geisha's education. A Japanese 
would be grossly offended if a girl should deviate a 
fraction from the prescribed usage. It is interest- 
ing once, but very tiresome, as is the whole geisha 
business. 

It is part of the old ceremonial life of Japan, the 
most exactly fixed, complex, stilted, artificial and 
sophisticated the world has ever seen. It is ruled 
and ordered as everything in Japan is. 

The geisha class are easily to be distinguished on 
the street by the way their hair is dressed. Other 
Japanese women roll their hair on the top and back 
of the head with a sort of pompadour in front. 
The geishas wear the pompadour, but the roll is 
changed to a sort of butterfly bow. The old geishas 
we saw had about nine hairs left, but the nine were 
arranged in a bow, four on one side and five on the 
other. While we were drinking our tea the writing- 
master inquired if we knew Madam Blank, wife of a 
retired general of our army. Unfortunately, we had 
not the honor. He told us that Madam Blank and 
her two daughters learned the tea service at this 
school, and one of them learned some of the dances. 

[233] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

He added naively: '^I always hear American radies 
much fraida to show theira leg. Madam Blank and 
her daughters not at all fraida." Bully for Madam 
Blank! Evidently she learned something over here 
besides the tea service. 

I have been asked ''Are the geishas immoral?" 
To answer that question one would have to go into 
the WOMAN QUESTION in Japan — a weighty, doubt- 
ful, deep and dangerous subject; but here goes. 

No Japanese is immoral. They are just unmoral; 
that is, they have no morals as we understand it. 
The sex relation is all ordered, ruled and fixed, like 
everything else. Boys and girls do not play to- 
gether, mix together, or associate. Wives are picked 
for their sons by the mothers. They are all mar- 
riages de convenance. There are no chance unions, 
no seductions, no bastards. It is not considered im- 
moral for a girl to enter a tea-house for an appren- 
ticeship of three or four years, to have commerce 
with men for hire. She receives at the end of the 
time a stipulated sum, with which for a dowry she 
marries and is a faithful wife and a devoted mother. 
The geisha class are professional entertainers, like 
[234] 



JAPAN. 



the flower-girls of China. They are usually immoral, 
nearly always so. When they retire with their earn- 
ings they marry as do other girls. It is no disgrace : 
it is simply a profession. No man of the middle 
class would hesitate to marry a geisha or tea-house 
girl if her dowry were sufficient. It is as hard for a 
Japanese girl to marry as for a French girl, unless 
she has a dowry, however small; something she can 
contribute to the family fortune. But the French 
girl without a dot is condemned to celibacy, while 
the poor Japanese girl may without shame become 
a geisha or a tea-house attendant, earn her dowry 
and marry. 

I cannot better show the present stage of Japanese 
morals than by this instance, perfectly authenti- 
cated, published in all the Tokio newspapers with 
full names. The Japanese Government maintains 
in Tokio a house of prostitution known as the Toshi- 
wara. It contains thirty-two hundred inmates, and is a 
government institution, like the tobacco monopoly 
and the railways. Many curious things might be 
told of this place, where American women go with- 
out criticism to see this side of Japanese life. We 
did not, for lack of time, but were told of it very 

[235] 



THE. FAR EAST TODAY. 

fully. Well, during the last war a Japanese desired 
to go and serve his country, but was debarred by the 
fact that he had a wife dependent on him. She re- 
moved the bar by entering the Toshiwara till his re- 
turn from the war. So far from being disgraced, she 
was exalted, highly commended for this act of patri- 
otism. Match that if you can, anywhere else in the 
world. The Japanese have solved two phases of the 
sex question : there are no bastards and no old maids 
in Japan. Don't ask me about the latter — you would 
not believe me, and it is too complex to explain here, 
but it is true. 

Of course the last word has not been said on mar- 
riage, and the relation of the sexes, any more in Japan 
than elsewhere, and many phases of it are changing 
there. Among the higher classes, love matches are 
now common w^here they were formerly unknown, 
but the things I have told remain true to-day in their 
entirety. Once more I say the Occidental and the 
Oriental cannot meet; there is a gulf fixed between 
them. 

When you read of the traffic in Chinese and Japan- 
ese girls for immoral purposes on the Pacific slope, 
and when I tell you that the men engaged in it are 
[236] 



JAPAN. 



men of high standing among both races, men of pro- 
bity, position, themselves moral, you will wonder. 
Perhaps the last few pages will partially explain. 
Their attitude toward women is wholly different from 
ours, and it remains the glory of the Teutonic races 
that from their earliest history the virtue of woman 
has been one of their cherished ideals. No other 
race in history has given women the rank that the 
Teutons have. 

Let us turn from this unpleasant subject, unpleas- 
ant, yet necessary if you would understand Japan, to 
something more cheerful. 

We visited the great Jiujitsu school one afternoon, 
or rather one noon, for this exercise is enforced upon 
all high-school boys three days in the week, from twelve 
till two. It is held in a great one-story building, open 
on all sides. There were five instructors, and we saw 
nearly a hundred pupils all at it. This was the real 
jiujitsu, especially when, after the pupils were through, 
two of the professors gave an exhibition. It is hard 
to describe, because it is hard to understand when 
you see it. Every movement is made with such 
lightning quickness that the eye can hardly follow 

[237] 



THEFAR EAST TODAY. 

it. Of course the science of all wrestling is leverage. 
The application of force at a point where the leverage 
is in favor of the attacking party. Every hold 
maneuvered for is to that end, like the half-Nelson, 
the hammer lock, and so on. Jiujitsu is simply a 
scientific extension of this principle, infinitely worked 
out. There are some three hundred separate holds 
or positions in it. The opponents, in linen jackets 
and short trousers, barefooted, face and grasp each 
other by the neck and arm; it is really a ''collar- 
and-elbow hold." A appears to give ground, and 
suddenly, placing his foot just above his opponent's 
knee, throws himself on his back. His opponent, 
forced by the pressure on his leg, which will break 
unless he yields, goes up and over on the foot of A, 
clear over and onto the floor, ten feet away. Nearly 
all the holds are based on this principle. If the hold 
is secured, you must go down or have a limb broken. 
The answer to this hold is for the opponent to throw 
himself quickly on the floor beside A, and the struggle 
is resumed on the floor, for it is not a fall till one hip 
and shoulder touch the floor. 

It was a wonderful exhibition of agility, strength, 
and good -nature. A boy would be thrown ten feet, 

[238] 



JAPAN 



clear over the head of his opponent, and get up laugh- 
ing and resume his hold. Every high-school pupil 
must take this for at least two years. Four years' 
study qualifies to teach. 

In the same room, a few feet away, the girls of the 
high school, some fifty of them, were learning fenc- 
ing. There were three teachers, two middle-aged 
men and one girl, the sprightliest, quickest and most 
athletic piece of femininity I have ever seen. They 
use two-handed wooden swords, grasped with both 
hands, in shape and size exactly like the old saumurai 
blades. They stamp and shout and rush at each 
other, feint, guard, strike and recover like old swords- 
men. Like everything Japanese, it is conventional. 
So many strokes this way, such a guard for every 
stroke, all laid down. and ordered and ruled. 

I fancy in the old days, when the great swordsmen 
flourished in Japan, they threw the rules away in a 
real fight; but it is fine exercise for the little girls, 
and they would come up to our platform panting 
and glowing with health and exercise when they were 
through. No wonder they are a healthy people, with 
their outdoor lives, their constant exercise, their 



[239] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

temperance in food and drink, their cleanliness and 
simple living. 

On one of those golden evenings Asole decided to 
show us a Japanese theater. There were plenty to 
choose from, some twenty, all together on Theatre 
street, a gay scene with the gaudy entrances, fervid 
announcements of the attractions in each, crowds 
coming and going, Japanese orchestras splitting the 
air, a Japanese Rialto. 

We voted for a patriotic play, a war drama of the 
old times. The admission was five cents, the room 
long and narrow, no seats, just a matting on which 
we squatted. The room was fairly well filled, with 
all ages and both sexes, who had left their clogs at 
the door. How they ever find them when they go 
out is a mystery, for they are all the same size and 
look exactly alike. Most of the men were smoking. 
Allien the curtain rose on the narrow stage a very 
ugly Jap strutted out, clad in an undershirt and a 
skirt hung from his hips. He grimaced and strutted, 
stamping across the stage and scowling. Once he 
half-squatted and waddled across the stage, and this 
seemed to amuse the audience immensely. Then he 
[240] 



JAPAN 



drew his two-handed sword and cut and slashed an 
imaginary enemy in the most terrifying way. Then 
he went up scene, and another and another went 
through the same pantomime till there were six of 
them. One of them carried a club, and seemed to 
be the funny man. Then they lined up, three on a 
side, and apparently dared each other to come on. 
It took a long time for the scrap to start, and when 
it did it was the tamest thing imaginable. There 
was never the slightest danger of anyone's getting 
hurt, and they attitudinized and grimaced tiresomely 
for fifteen minutes. Then the heroine appeared. 
She was a buxom Japanese girl with her hair down 
her back, which gave her a very wild look in that 
land of neat coiffures. When she appeared there was 
something doing. She declaimed for a while in a 
shrill voice, and then grabbed the club from the funny 
man and whacked him off the stage, the others stand- 
ing apparently paralyzed with amazement. Then 
she knocked the sword out of the hand of another, 
picked it up and bored a hole in his stomach, or pre- 
tended to. That settled him. He was dead. He 
knew it, and retired to a corner of the stage hors du 
combat. Apparently he was not satisfied with the 

[241] 



THEFAR EAST TODAY. 

manner of his untimely taking-off, for he calmly- 
pulled up his undershirt and examined the place 
where there should have been a large hole in his 
stomach. Not finding any, he seemed to feel re- 
lieved, and immediately borrowed a cigarette from 
one of the orchestra, lit it, and for the rest of the per- 
formance was the happiest-looking dead man I have 
seen in a long time. 

In the mean time, the heroine was stamping and 
declaiming, kicking up behind and rearing up in front, 
and swatting the other performers till she had the 
whole bunch down and out. Then an attendant 
rushed out with a Japanese flag, and when the cur- 
tain fell on the gory field covered with dead and 
wounded she was standing with her legs straddled 
as far apart as possible, still declaiming and waving 
the flag. 

I never did find out what it was about, for Asole 
did not seem to know; but it pleased the audience. 



Kioto is not lacking in picturesque scenery, for all 
about it are beautiful hills, streams, waterfalls and 
lakes, within easy driving distance. One of our 

[242] 



JAPAN. 



memorable trips was to Lake Biwa and back down 
the canal that pierces the mountains. The lake lies 
several hundred feet above Kioto, nestled in high 
hills, and drains into the Japan Sea to the north. 
It is only eight miles from Kioto ; is some fifty miles 
long and from one to twenty miles wide. As it is 
surrounded with villages, rice and tea farms, it is a 
busy waterway, and when we saw its waters they 
were thickly dotted with small steamers and sail- 
boats. In 1888 a bright young Japanese engineer 
conceived the idea of utilizing the waters of the lake 
for the benefit of Kioto and its commerce. He dug 
a canal nine miles long and thirty feet wide through 
the hills and above the valley, and finally led the 
waters to the very edge of Kioto, where there is a 
fall of two hundred feet that furnishes light for all 
Kioto, motive-power for the street cars and for the 
various mills. An inclined railway hauls boats up 
from the canal that runs from Kioto to Osake ; from 
there they are drawn by coolies to Lake Biwa, thus 
opening water transport from Osake on the Gulf to 
the very interior of the country. 

We drove from Kioto to Otsu, where the canal 
leaves the foot of the lake, a charming drive, with 

[243] 



THE'FAR EAST TODAY. 

the same low-hung carriage with two big fat horses 
and the boy to run in front. He ran nearly all of 
the eight miles, keeping ahead of the horses with ease. 
The road leads up a valley nearly all the way, a road 
that is one long street, with farm-houses touching 
elbows, and the tiny farms stretch back up the hills 
on either side. Not like an American farm-house, 
I assure you, for the first thing that strikes you about 
the farms in Japan is the absence of domestic ani- 
mals. Never a cow or a horse. All the hauling, 
nearly, is done by hand, two- wheeled carts hauled 
by men and women. The absence of cows puzzled 
me till I learned the reason. There is no grazing in 
the Far East. You see hills covered with beautiful 
verdure, everywhere in China, Japan, and the PhiHp- 
pines, but no cattle, not even a goat. The grass is a 
kind of saw-grass, bamboo-grass, they call it, that is 
death to ruminants. The few cattle that are kept, 
mainly bullocks for hauling, are fed on forage, hand- 
raised, very expensive. I did not taste fresh milk 
or cream on the entire trip. Everything is con- 
densed milk, mostly from America. The beef and 
mutton come mainly from Australia in refrigerator 
ships. Just the other day the beef contract for our 
[244] 



JAPAN. 



soldiers in the Philippines was let to an Australian 
concern. The Governor-General there, who has a 
salary of twenty-five thousand dollars a year, keeps 
two cows. By virtue of his official position and to 
maintain its dignity, he must do so. It is said that 
the expense of keeping these cows was one of the 
reasons that Taft gave up his job. We saw an Aus- 
tralian heifer on the streets of Manila, and she ex- 
cited more attention than an elephant would here. 

So, vast areas in Japan that would be raising beef 
and mutton with us, are barren wastes, producing 
nothing, and one great source of agricultural profit 
is denied to the farmers of Japan. 

The farm-houses are all alike. We stopped at one 
for a drink of water. The fronts are all open, closed 
by several doors that in the daytime are slid back 
into a box at one corner. The first room is work- 
shop, kitchen and dining-room; in fact, the living- 
room of the house. It is stone-floored, spotlessly 
clean, with a stone tub in the middle, into which 
pours a little stream of pure water led from the hills 
above, that overflowing wanders out the back door 
and irrigates a little garden. The other room has 
a floor raised some two feet, covered with matting, 

[245] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

and is the sleeping, reception and state-room of the 
house. Here the few family treasures are kept, and 
here they sleep, on the floor, with a kind of saw-horse 
for a pillow. No chairs, no beds, no carpets, — just 
matting and saw-horses. 

Two dollars would have been an extravagant price 
for all the furniture in this house. Back of the house 
a path centuries old led steeply up the hill, and at 
every turn is a stone, a sort of altar, reared to some 
dead-and-gone ancestor, before which are tiny offer- 
ings of rice and paper flowers, just as in China they 
are placed before the tombs. 

In the larger houses the family tablets are kept 
in the living-rooms, but in either case they are always 
near by, reminding the descendants always of their 
duty and obligation to the dead. 

On each side of the road runs a thread of water, not 
idle, but busy everywhere. Here it waters a fringe 
of bamboos, there it irrigates a little rice-field, and 
next it turns the overshot wheel of a mill where the 
rice is ground. There is nothing idle in Japan, not 
even the water. In summer the lower reaches of the 
rivers look like the Arkansas, for all the water is taken 
out farther up and put to some beneficial use. 

[246] 



JAPAN. 



Everywhere on the road is traffic, on foot, coming 
and going. Here a cart with two men drawing a 
load heavy enough for a pair of horses, there a woman 
swinging along with two baskets of vegetables or 
crates of fowls, hung from a bamboo pole across her 
shoulder. Only the children are idle. As a rule, 
Japanese children have a good time. They are sel- 
dom put to work till they are ten. They are under 
practically no restraint from birth till they are eight. 
The Japanese believe that it is useless to try to dis- 
cipline a child of such tender years. '^As the twig 
is bent the tree's inclined'' does not go in Japan. 
So until the age of eight they play in the sun, do as 
they please. At the age of eight they begin to be 
restrained, gradually at first, more closely, more 
rigidly as they age, until at fifteen they are typical 
Japanese, self-controlled, reserved, staid, and thor- 
oughly disciplined. 

The discipline and routine become more rigid each 
year till the Japanese ideal of self-control is estab- 
lished. Foreign teachers in the Japanese schools 
have commented on this change, so gradual yet so 
complete, in these formative years. The children 
are gay, happy, careless, thoughtless, like ours. But 

[247] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

by the age of fifteen or sixteen they have lost all 
youthful looks and youthful ways and are miniature 
men and women. As in everything else, they re- 
verse our rules. In fact, everything in Japan is the 
reverse of everything here. Even the carpenter pulls 
the plane toward him instead of pushing it, and they 
build the roof first, the house afterward. 

The canal leaves the lake at a little fishing-village 
called Otsu, and on the hills above is the old Mijidera 
temple, one of the oldest in Japan, before which is a 
gigantic live-oak said to be the oldest tree in Japan, 
and it looks it. The view from the temple platform, 
of the lake winding away beyond eyeshot, the sur- 
rounding hills covered with rice and tea, the busy 
life of the lake, the little village below, make a pic- 
ture purely Japanese. 

When we took our seats in the boat for the canal 
trip, our hearts sunk just a little. A railway tunnel 
is bad enough, but somehow this dark stream that 
just before us plunges into a low cavern cut in a lofty 
hill, was rather gloomy-looking. Two boatmen with 
an oar in the stern steer the boat and the swift cur- 
rent does the rest. We darted down between high 
banks crowned with great cryptomeria trees, shot 
[ 248 ] 



j:j 



JAPAN. 



into the vault, and the dayhght was gone. We 
could touch the damp roof overhead. An occasional 
sprinkle of water penetrating some crevice in the 
skin of the tunnel was not reassuring. A paper 
lantern on the bow with a candle in it was the only 
light, for the tunnel entrance vanished quickly. The 
low talk of the boatmen, the ripple of the subter- 
ranean stream, resounded in the vault with startling 
sonority. 

Far off we saw another tiny light, and in a moment 
swept by another boat loaded with freight coming up 
against the stream. Two coolies, a man and a woman, 
naked to the waist, pulled it by a chain fastened to 
the wall of the tunnel. Twice we passed loaded boats 
going down with the current. About midway a nar- 
row shaft from the top of the mountain supplies the 
tunnel with air. We were in the tunnel only twenty 
minutes, but it seemed hours. We were on the 
fabled Styx, bound for some nether world, peopled 
with Shades like ourselves, Charon at the oar, Cer- 
berus before us. At last, far off, a tiny gleam of day- 
light, the other end, more welcome than any daylight 
I ever saw. The candle burned out as we struck the 
light as though it were timed for the passage, and the 

[ 249 ] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

open disclosed a wonderful scene. The canal there 
is hung on the side of the mountain, following its 
windings, far above a green valley, and crowded with 
traffic. Huge barges pulled by coolies, men and 
women, half-naked, glistening with sweat, trudged 
the tow-path, and with their breasts in a rope pulled 
against the swift current. Passenger boats well 
filled drawn the same way. Picnic parties gay with 
kimonos flashing smiles at us as we passed. Patient 
fishermen angling without apparent results. Vil- 
lages with a few scattering houses, waving bamboos, 
lotus blooming along the banks, and strange wild- 
flowers everywhere on the slopes. Above us the 
green-clad hills, far off across the valley, other hills 
melting into blue haze in the distance, and all about 
us the sparkling, multicolored, busy Japanese life. 
Worth crossing the sea for, that trip was, the most 
interesting, I think, of all our side trips. 

Another tunnel, but shorter (the first is over a 
mile in length), and then two shorter ones, and Kioto 
is below us, and far off, a dim streak where lies the 
Bay of Kobe. 

It takes an hour, this unique trip, and simply as 
an engineering marvel it is worth it. 
[250] 




JAPANESE FISHERMAN. 



J A P AgN . 



We shot the famous rapids, between Kameoka and 
Arashiyama, one of the most picturesque of trips. 
We wandered through more temples, saw the new 
palace (no great sight), and the Imperial Gardens, 
till our four days were gone, like a dream, and it was 
time to go. 

I have never enjoyed four days more, for no city 
in the world is more purely characteristic of its people, 
more unspoiled by foreign contact, than this old town. 
Its '^ atmosphere" is all Japan. 

We had intended to spend a day at Myanoshita, a 
watering-place between Kioto and Yokohama, but 
a washout on the railroad — ^how familiar that sounded! 
— necessitated a long detour, and we gave it up and 
traveled direct to Yokohama. 

A RAILWAY TRIP. 

The Japanese railways are practically all state- 
owned, all narrow-gauge, and fairly well built. I 
say fairly. The road-bed is good, but not of the best. 
The engines are all of English make, and the speed 
seldom goes above thirty miles an hour. The first- 
class fare is straight two cents a mile, third-class as 
low as three-quarters of a cent. In the first-class 

[251] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

cars the seats are along the side. There are good 
toilet conveniences, and through trains carry sleepers 
at night and dining-cars by day. The sleepers are 
patterned after our narrow-gauge Pullmans. The 
dining-cars serve an excellent lunch for forty cents 
gold, and dinner for sixty cents. Every passenger 
pays a tax to the Government in addition to his fare, 
something like ten cents of our money on long trips. 
The stations are well built, and the courtesy of em- 
ployes leaves nothing to be wished for. You may 
travel from end to end of Japan without knowing 
the language, for always there is some one around 
who has a little English. 

Among our fellow-passengers were a charming 
Jewish couple just married, she an Englishwoman, 
who had gone to school at Lausanne with a daughter 
of Gardiner Lathrop, and he French, eight years in 
the wine import business at Yokohama, speaking 
Japanese hke a native. They were very kind to us 
at Yokohama, and I got from him another side of the 
Japanese business character. His partner is a native, 
and Mr. W. told me that among themselves, in their 
business dealings with each other, there is absolute 
honesty. He thinks as I do, that their dishonesty 
[252] 




T- ■, ? *-^ ^. i^ 'h'^^ . '^ 



V V 



\ '^y'C' 




JAPAN 



is a passing phase of national character that is al- 
ready amending. It is due to two causes : 

Under the shogunate, in the old days, the highest 
class was the soldier, the saumurai, or 'Hwo-sword 
men." They were gentry, petty nobles, entitled to 
wear two swords. Their only business was arms. 
The next in rank was the agricultural class, the farm- 
ers; and below them all the merchants or traders. 
Each class was fixed by heredity, and none could rise 
to a superior class. Traders were low people, very 
low, and the taint of trade, the shame of their em- 
ployment, made them dishonest. It is less than 
fifty years since these restrictions were removed, and 
now that the merchant and trading class are the 
equals of every one, now that Japan has grown demo- 
cratic and trade is deemed honorable and the highest 
nobles in the empire engage in it, a change is coming 
swiftly. 

Besides that, the old system of Japan was largely 
communal. Artisans were the dependents on rich 
families. They did not work for hire. Their living 
was assured. It was thus, assured of a livelihood, 
with no care for the future, that those great artists 
of the old time grew up. It was thus that they con- 

[253] 



THE .FAR EAST TODAY. 

ceived and executed those marvels of patient indus- 
try and beautiful form that are the admiration and 
despair of moderns. 

When the old system broke down, the communal 
society was abandoned. When men began to work 
for hire and sell their own handiwork, they were met 
with an invasion from the outside world of a class 
unknown to them. Most of the earlier traders who 
came there were adventurers of the lowest class, and 
the Japanese quickly found that he was cheated at 
every turn. Nothing was more natural than that he, 
new to the competitive system, should conceive that 
its essence was dishonesty. He followed the example 
set him by the Occidentals he first traded with. 

Now he is learning differently. Even in California, 
where there is such an outcry against Japanese dis- 
honesty, they will tell you that there are many ex- 
ceptions, many Japanese of scrupulous honesty ; and 
the number is increasing. They are learning the les- 
son the Chinese learned long ago, that honesty is 
best in business. 

Another fellow-traveler was a Japanese colonel, a 
powerfully built, swarthy man, dark as a negro, and 
one of the most military figures I have ever seen. 
[254] 



JAPAN 



But the pleasantest part of the trip was another 
acquaintance we made. At one of the stations, a 
junction point where the railroad from the north met 
ourSj there was a crowd of officers in white uniforms 
and high-class civil officials bidding good-by to a 
native in plain clothes. It was evident that he was 
a person of importance, with his servant and his secre- 
tary. We were struck with the profound respect that 
he received from every one — the entire crowd stood 
at salute when the train pulled out — but still more 
with his marvelous resemblance to a well-known Kan- 
san, Gen. Wilder M. The same height, the same 
erect carriage, the same square, soldierly figure, 
piercing eye, the same in everything, features, man- 
ner and all, except that our Japanese friend has more 
hair than the General. 

A fat Shinto priest who was traveling second-class 
came in to see him and bowed to the ground. At 
every station where we stopped there were officers 
and civilians to see him, and all bobbing and saluting. 
At the foot of Mt. Fuji we made his acquaintance. 
As we approached it, there are three peaks almost 
alike, and we were puzzling as to which was the 
sacred mountain, when he leaned forward and told 



[255] 



THE, FAR EAST TODAY. 

us. We fell into conversation, found him charm- 
ing, speaking English and French fluently, and talked 
for two hours with him about Japan, its past, present 
and future. 

That he was a great official we divined, that he was 
a man of the highest intelligence we knew, widely 
traveled and read, familiar with all the courts of 
Europe. 

The next day I asked a friend in Yokohama for 
the identity of our traveling companion. I de- 
scribed him, and he said, '^You have met Baron 
Hyashi, the second man of the Empire, next to Ito." 
He was returning from Seoul, where he had been 
helping Ito settle the Korean mess. 

We had entertained an angel unawares. Maybe, 
though, if I had known how great a man he was, I 
should have been too awestruck to enjoy his company. 

By the way, some of these resemblances of ori- 
entals to home folks are queer. For instance, I found 
Fred V. in Canton cutting up fowls in a butcher- 
shop. I knew him at once by his nose and his 
stomach. And Van never dissected a politician or 
flayed one of his dislikes with greater skill than his 
doppelganger dismembered that chicken. I found 
[256] 



JAPAN 



Judge Frank D., shaven and garbed as a Buddhist 
priest, beating a big drum in a temple at Nikko. 
The priests take turns an hour about keeping Buddha 
awake with a kettle-drum. The resemblance was 
exact. I wonder if there is not something in phre- 
nology, nosology and the like? 

Here was General M.'s alter ego, a soldier. Van, 
who is a vivisectionist, finds his double in the same 
business of a lower kind. And how thoroughly apt 
that Judge D.'s counterpart should be a Buddhist! 
The Judge's best opinions have the same sublety, 
the same involutions, refinements, metaphysical laby- 
rinths, the same finished reasoning, so clear that it 
is wholly obscure to the lay mind, as an essay on the 
Higher Buddhism. 

A daylight ride through Japan is of course a kaleido- 
scope of the strange and new. A railway ride through 
America nowadays reveals merely a long procession 
of hideous, gaudy signs, insulting the eye in the midst 
of the most beautiful scenery. The glorious Mohawk 
Valley in New York is ruined by these detestable 
evidences of enterprise. If I were lord of all that is, 
I would hang every man who attempts to put up a 

[257] 



THE. FAR EAST TODAY. 

sign on any natural object. It is bad enough to have 
them on a store, where they belong, but it is a crime 
that should be punished without benefit of clergy 
to deface God's handiwork with ads. for tooth-wash, 
hams, paint and the like. Japan, unfortunately, is 
beginning to imitate us in this as in many other 
things of small decency, but only about the great 
cities like Tokio and Yokohama, that are more or 
less Americanized. 

The most striking feature of our ride through 
Japan was the unending row of bowed backs, mostly 
turned from us, bobbing away at their tasks in the 
rice - fields and tea - gardens. Those innumerable 
sturdy buttocks, male and female, each with a hoe, 
never rising up to even glance at our train, are a 
distinctive feature of Japan. They wear great coni- 
cal straw hats, two feet across, and as a further pro- 
tection against the sun a sort of mat of straw thatch 
hung over the back. 

Every farm-house has its flowers. The wistaria 
bloom is past and the chrysanthemums have not yet 
come, but in a corner of every little rice-field is a 
great bunch of lotus, many-colored, enormous in size. 

[ 258 ] 



JAPAN 



No matter how small the home, there must be some- 
where a space for flowers. 

Abundant rainfall makes Japan very green, green 
as the Emerald Isle, and gives besides innumerable 
small streams, waterfalls and lakes, those beauties 
that only abundant water lends to a landscape. 

Rice is beautiful growing, but a tea plantation 
makes perhaps as fine a show as any agricultural 
plant. I visited the largest tea plantation in Japan, 
near Kioto, and for the first time learned something 
about tea as it is grown. 

I remember when I was a boy that my father al- 
ways drank Young Hyson, and I used to wonder 
where Old Hyson was, and how Young Hyson hap- 
pened to break into the game all alone ; wondered if 
Young Hyson would be Old Hyson when Old Hyson 
was gone. I wondered at the strange hieroglyphics 
on the boxes and the strange exotic flavors that came 
from them, and little thought I should ever go where 
those strange boxes came from and see Young Hy- 
son at home. 

Tea is an evergreen shrub that grows from three 
to five feet high. It is planted in rows, and at a little 
distance looks like a well-trimmed box hedge. It 
[259] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

came originally from Assam; is, I believe, a kind of 
wild camellia, but has been domesticated in China 
and Japan for more than a thousand years. It is 
even more widely diffused than wheat, for it grows 
from Japan clear across the equator, even to Aus- 
tralia. 

In China, black tea comes from the south and green 
tea from the north, as the latter is hardy while the 
former requires a moist, warm climate. Japan raises 
nothing but green tea. Brick tea, much used in 
central Asia and Russia, is the stems and broken 
leaves pressed into brick form. 

Black tea owes its color to the fact that it is ex- 
posed to the air before it is roasted. 

There are four processes in the preparation of tea 
for market. It is first wilted, then rolled by hand, 
then fermented, and finally roasted or fired. All 
are delicate processes, requiring considerable skill. 
Green tea has the greater fragrance but less of the 
thein. 

Young Hyson is from two Chinese words that 
mean ''before the rains." Oolong means "black 
dragon." 

The tea plant must be three years old before it 

[260] 



JAPAN. 



yields. After that, four crops a year are taken from 
it: in April, May, July, and September; only the 
new leaves being picked. The yield runs from three 
hundred to three hundred and fifty pounds to the 
acre. So there you are : you know all about it now 
— as much as I do, any way. It is the staple drink 
of more millions of people than any other beverage 
in the world, not excepting alcohol in all its forms. 

On this trip we were for four hours within sight of 
Fujiyama, or ''Jujisan," ''Mr. Juji'' or ''Lord Fuji'' 
as the Japanese call it. I have started two or three 
times to describe it, and each time shied away from 
it because it is beyond my power or the power of any 
man to give you any adequate idea of this most 
beautiful of the world's mountains. So old globe- 
trotters agree. I had thought that nothing moun- 
tainous could be more beautiful than the Jungfrau 
from Interlaken. But the Jungfrau owes more to 
its setting than to its shape. Fuji needs no setting, 
no staging, though in fact it is gloriously set. It is 
the sacred mountain of Japan, worshipped and pil- 
grimages made to it by thousands every August. 
It is a volcano, extinct since 1707, when in its last 

[2611 



THE, FAR EAST TODAY. 

eruption it threw ashes into Yeddo, sixty miles away. 
It is twelve thousand feet high, with a shallow crater, 
and can be distinctly seen from Yokohama on a 
clear day, so much does it tower above its fellows. 

The approach to it from the west by rail is perfect. 
You see it dimly among other peaks, then lose it till 
suddenly the train dashes round a jut of rock, we are 
following a mountain stream, climbing fast, and it 
bursts upon us from across a wide valley, where the 
foreground is cultivated fields, melting into bamboo 
and oak forest that pm'ple into indistinctness at the 
mountain's foot, twenty miles away. 

AVhen we saw it first it was perhaps five o'clock. 
The sun was behind us and lighting dimly the moun- 
tain's western face. By a curious atmospheric trick 
the middle third of it was hidden by a translucent 
opal-tinted veil of mist, and from out this the great 
peak soars, as if it were swimming in a sea of cloud, 
its base impalpable. In shape it is a regular trun- 
cated cone, with three little notches at the top. 
Regular, I say; the hand of man could not make 
anything more regular, more perfect than it appears 
at this distance. There are no near-by mountains 
to dwarf it, no neighbors, such as Pike's Peak and 

[262] 



JAPAN 



Mont Blanc have. It leaves the valley at perhaps 
four thousand feet and rises clean eight thousand 
feet. At that hour the lights upon it were almost 
unearthly in their beauty. I have never seen at- 
mospheric effects Hke it among the mountains. There 
was no purple haze blurring its outlines. It stood 
out above this opalescent middle belt, as clear-cut 
as a cameo, and seemed of heaven-reaching height. 
For two hours I clung to my window, kneeling on my 
narrow seat, and just gloated over it until it seemed 
not a real mountain, but a vision, something ethereal, 
the spirit of a mountain. There was nothing gross 
or palpable, but all shimmering and shining, yet al- 
ways clearly cut, perfect in outline, in color, in sur- 
roundings, an ideal mountain. No wonder the Jap- 
anese worship it. I worshipped it as long as it was in 
sight. God has never made anything more beautiful, 
more uplifting to the human soul, than that great 
peak. 

At Kodzu we must change cars for Yokohama. 
The millennium does not come with state ownership 
of railroads. When the great east-and-west trunk 
line of the Islands, the ^'Tokaido" line from Tokio 

[263] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

to Nagasaki at the southwest comer, was built, there 
was a fuss on between the boss of the railways and 
the Governor of Yokohama. To get even, the railway 
boss left Yokohama off the line twelve miles and ran 
a branch to it. So the greatest seaport of the islands 
was left off this main stem and stuck on a branch. 
There is another main line running north from Yo- 
kohama that goes through Tokio, which is fifty min- 
utes ride from Yokohama. 

It was like getting back home again to enter the 
Grand at Yokohama, and get the friendly greeting 
of my Scotch namesake Smith, who runs it, and every 
one high and low seemed to know us and be glad to 
see us. 

It is a great pity that American hotel managers 
cannot send their employes to Japan for a few months 
to learn how guests should be treated. The you- 
can-stay-or-get-out air of America is not thought to 
be the proper thing here. They have the old-fash- 
ioned idea that also prevails in Europe, that a guest 
who pays his money is something to be desired, to 
be welcomed, looked after, made as much at home as 
possible. Of course in America the idea is quite 
different. The people who run hotels are superior 

[264] 



JAPAN 



beings. To be allowed to associate with one of them 
is a privilege vouchsafed only to the elect. The clerk 
is a Grand Duke, the head waiter a Count, and the 
bell-boys insolent young ruffians who ought to be 
kicked once an hour. Undoubtedly the best Amer- 
ican hotels are the best in the world. They are also 
the most exorbitant. I can travel by automobile 
through the fairest parts of Europe, over roads that 
are better than our best city pavements, through 
scenes replete with every interest, pay all bills, in- 
cluding the hire of the automobile, for less money 
than I can stay at a first-class hotel in any of our 
great cities. 

No wonder foreigners rave at the expense of trav- 
eling in America. . It is frightful. It is not alone the 
comfort, the luxury of these great hostelries,— it is 
the insensate, vulgar ostentation and display for 
which we pay with a big profit added. What sensi- 
ble man cares for onyx and gold in the lobby where 
he sits occasionally, or through which he walks only 
two or three times a day? What can be more vulgar, 
for instance, than a hotel like the Waldorf in New 
York?— not even good taste; just lavish display of 
the tawdriest kind. I do not believe the better class 

[265] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

of Americans care for it. I know an old hotel in New 
York that has never been done over. Its lobby is in 
plain oak, its furniture fine, yet not gaudy, but its 
kitchen is famous on two continents. It holds a 
trade that is all the best, makes money, and you can 
stay there for half you are cheated out of at those 
circus- wagon hotels farther uptown. 

We did not go to Tokio to stay. It is the most 
exasperating town imaginable to get about in. Talk 
of the magnificent distances of Washington — Tokio 
has it beaten four ways. Fancy two million people 
spread out in houses of not to exceed two stories high, 
and you will get an idea of the superficial area of this 
capital. I don't know how many hundred square 
miles it covers, but I know it takes from one to two 
hours in a rickshaw to get anywhere. No matter 
where you stop, the points of interest are so scattered 
that you are half your time riding. 

The streets are much like those of Kioto, but more 
foreign, more foreigners on the street, for it is so near 
Yokohama that every one who stops even for a day 
there goes to Tokio, and you are constantly meeting 
foreigners. It has none of the charm of Kioto, 
except in spots that are far apart. 

[266] 



JAPAN. 



F. had heard of '^ culture pearls," so we had to go 
there first. I believe the pearl oyster secretes the 
pearl to cover some irritating substance that has 
found its way into the shell and wounds and annoys 
its muscular tissue. So an ingenious Jap has learned 
to produce them artificially. He takes his oyster, 
makes a little incision in the muscular tissue and in- 
serts a tiny piece of glass. The oyster proceeds to 
cover it, and produces a real pearl. It is not an im- 
itation; it is a real pearl, but only half a pearl. Cu- 
riously enough, so far, though he has been at it for 
twenty years, he has never been able to produce a 
true round pearl. They are flat on one side, but the 
round side has all the lustre and sheen of the natural 
pearl. They do admirably for rings, shirt-stud set- 
tings and the like, and sell for about a fifth of the price 
of the same size produced naturally. The Govern- 
ment, which fosters everything here, pays him a yearly 
subsidy and gives him a breeding-ground for his oys- 
ters at Shimoneseki. 

To have secured permission to see the palace of 
the Mikado would have required a two-hours trip 
to the American legation, a long wait, and then more 
ceremonies ; and I gave it up. We saw the Imperial 

[267] 



TH.E FAR EAST TODAY, 



Gardens and others of the nobility, but did not ad- 
mire them. It is all artificial, diminutive, conven- 
tional, without a touch of nature. In none of the 
gardens and in none of the public parks is there any 
grass. Somehow the idea of a lawn has never pen- 
etrated the oriental mind. They don't know how 
beautiful a bluegrass lawn can be — more beautiful, 
to my mind, than all the formal gardens in the world. 
F. has heard of some ivory carvings and some things 
that she had not priced yet, and so I left her at her 
favorite pursuit and went alone to Nikko. 



NIKKO. 

This famous old temple city of Japan lies well up 
in the northern part, one hundred and fifty miles 
from Tokio. It was a Sunday when I started, an 
excursion day, and the train was crowded with for- 
eigners mostly going to the watering-places that 
line the eastern slopes of the hills this side of Nikko. 
At a junction point most of them left, and I had the 
car nearly to myself. 

As you go north from Tokio the country grows 
wilder, less cultivated. There are wide areas, level 
enough, where nothing grows but scrub pine and oak. 

[268] 



JAPAN. 



Whether it can be cultivated or not I do not know, 
but certainly that part is not thickly settled; in 
fact, near Nikko it is the reverse. I have said much 
about Japanese agriculture, but whether it is to be 
praised or not remains a question in my mind. Cer- 
tainly it is minute, for average holdings do not ex- 
ceed an acre. Japanese authorities say that it is 
unscientific, old-fashioned, and that much can be 
done, is being done, to improve its methods. For 
instance, only twelve per cent of all Japan is in culti- 
vation. Some writers, assuming that Japan re- 
sembles other countries, where on the average forty- 
eight per cent is tillable, say that Japan does not 
make the most of her natural resources. But it 
must be remembered that Japan is a series of islands 
of volcanic origin, with but a small percentage of 
level land. Still, it is true that I saw miles of country 
that in Belgium or France would be raising trees, if 
nothing else. In Switzerland, regions far more in- 
hospitable produce great crops. Japan seems to 
have no forestry. Bamboo is the only tree that is 
planted. Instead of clothing these hills and waste 
places with pine, she imports her timber from Amer- 



[269] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

ica, and now from Manchuria, and does nothing with 
her waste places. 

Certainly Japan is poor enough to use every re- 
source, the poorest country in the world. She has 
practically nothing but agriculture and fisheries to 
depend upon. The Government is making stren- 
uous efforts by subventions to build up manufactures 
and shipping with some success, but she has no miner- 
als to speak of. A little copper, some in the neigh- 
borhood of Nikko. Some poor steaming coal. No 
iron, silver or gold. The Nippon Ginko, the national 
bank of Japan, gave out a statement in January 
showing the national resources. Surely this insti- 
tution would not belittle the wealth of the country, 
and here are the figures, startling enough. It places 
the national wealth of Japan, all told, at less than six 
billion dollars. Contrast that with our more than a 
hundred billion. The average annual revenue per 
capita is placed at $15, out of which they pay two 
dollars a year in taxes, leaving a net income for each 
man, woman and child per annum to live on, of $13. 
Even this is exaggerated, because it is based on an 
estimate of twelve per cent return on its capital, 
which can hardly be reached. The balance of trade 

[270] 




THUNDER GOD, SHINTO TEMPLE. 



JAPAN. 



against Japan last year was fifteen millions. The 
total agricultural product of all Japan last year 
with its forty-eight million people was less that than 
of Kansas— less, in fact, than the egg crop of the 
United States alone. 

But think of an average annual income, net, of 
thirteen dollars a head! 

You may if you are credulous believe that Japan 
intends to go to war with America, but personally, 
I believe the men who run Japan have too much sense. 
She could not carry on another war for a single month. 
The last one cost her $1,700,000,000. She was at 
the point of exhaustion when peace was declared, 
exhaustion not only of money, but of men. The 
draft that was going forward when the war closed 
was what is known as the ^'eighth line," the last, in 
fact, for it was boys of eighteen and men of forty- 
five. 

She cannot make another loan, for every resource 
is mortgaged now. But for the indemnity of fifty 
millions that came from Russia there would have 
been a deficit this year. 

She is at the end of her resources, for it takes the 
purse now to do the fighting. Most of her guns and 

[271] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

war material must be renewed before another war. 
More than that, she has her hands full in assimi- 
lating Korea, a task that will take years. 

I could give other figures that would show the 
poverty of this people, but these suffice. Nothing 
but a patriotism that is fanatic, a courage that is 
desperate, would have carried her as far as she has 
gone. 

She staked her last dollar in the war with Russia, 
in the hope of getting Manchuria as an outlet for her 
surplus population, and failed. True, she has Korea, 
a rich country, richer than Japan, and with that she 
must be content till she mends her finances, which 
will take years. She makes a bluff that she is launch- 
ing new battleships. They are simply the old Rus- 
sian ships patched up. 

As one approaches Nikko by rail the first of its 
beauties is the great avenue of cryptomeria, a giant 
cedar that grows like a pine, straight and tall. This 
avenue, planted on each side the '^Pilgrims' road," 
leading to the shrines of Nikko, is more than three 
hundred years old. The great cedars will average 
three feet through and a hundred and fifty feet high, 

[272] 




CRYPTOMERIA ROAD. 



JAPAN. 



and were set so closely that now they almost touch. 
The long dim avenue is like a cathedral isle, with the 
brown trunks splashed with green moss rising sixty 
feet without a limb, each straight and perfect, and 
the burst of feathery foliage that meets above, the 
half-twilight, and the stone road worn by pious feet 
that tells of its age-old travel. 

So far in this wandering narrative I have not used 
the guide-book much, but at Nikko, the Nikko Hotel 
has compiled a guide-book of the sights of the vicin- 
ity that is so naive and refreshing that I am tempted 
to draw upon it just a little. For instance, I am 
told of the wonderful sacred bridge ''over which no 
one are allowed to pass." ''For person pressed for 
time may ride down" the cryptomeria avenue and 
take the railroad below. "This excursion are mostly 
on flat, and therefore no afraidness shall be experi- 
enced." "It may easily go up and back same day," 
where "a good, splendid view can be attained." 
"This is the easy most pleasantest way to ascent and 
there can find the good hotel accomodation." Eng- 
lish as she is written in Japan. 

But Nikko needs no guide-book. You may miss 
part of it, but you will see enough anyway. There 

[273J 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

is plenty to keep you busy if you stay a week or a 
month, for this is the heart of country Japan, where 
the old ways linger and progress has not come to blight 
the old quaintness. 

Nikko, like Manitou, lies along a narrow gorge in 
the mountains, down which tumbles and foams and 
babbles a clear mountain stream. It is just a long 
street lined on each side with one-story buildings, 
shop in front, living-room in the rear, and each with 
a little garden behind. The shop-fronts are all 
open, and you may look through and into the living- 
room and through that into the gardens, where the 
five o'clock bath is going on. At five o'clock every 
one in Old Japan takes a hot bath in the back yard. 
Neighbor gossips to neighbor across the line. If a 
customer comes into the shop, the man wraps a 
towel around his loins and comes in to wait on him. 
It is somewhat startling at first to see the mother of 
a family emerge from a tub and coolly dry herself 
in plain view from the street, and girls in the cos- 
tume of Eve before the Fall chase each other across 
the tiny yards. Of course I blushed a proper Ameri- 
can blush and turned my face the other way, but it 
was just the same on the other side, and the street 

[274] 



JAPAN. 



was unfortunately so narrow that I could not quite 
confine my eyes to it. That I did not, this chronicle 
confesses, but it was all very innocent, and none of 
them realized for a moment how shocking it was, 
therefore I ceased to be shocked, if I ever was. 

At the head of the street another gorge comes in, 
up which half a mile lies my hotel, the Nikko Hotel, 
and just there is the "sacred bridge," some fifty feet 
long, all of priceless red lacquer, across which none 
but the Imperial family may pass. When you pay 
ten dollars for a red lacquer tray you may fancy what 
this bridge is worth nowadays. 

A tiny tramway runs along the stream, coming 
from a copper mine farther up, and a huge bullock 
with a tent of thatch over his back to keep off the 
sun, paces statelily along, drawing a little car, loaded, 
not with copper, but with girls just back from a 
picnic somewhere in the hills. 

As F. is not with me I fear I neglected the shops. 
There are several things I did not price that first 
evening, though I had nothing else to do. But it is 
a famous place for furs. The sable, the marten, the 
silver fox and dozens of others are brought there 
from the far north of the Islands, and even from 



[275] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

Saghalien, to be prepared by these skilled fur- workers. 
Beautiful leopard and tiger skins, unplucked seal 
tanned in its natural state, fur slippers and gloves, 
fur robes and coats, every kind of the most beauti- 
ful fur that the frozen north can produce, are shown 
here, — and shamefully cheap. I was glad F. was not 
along, for even to me the prices were just resistible, 
no more. 

Nikko is the Rome, the Holy City of Japan. What 
started it I don't know, but it has more temples than 
any other city in Japan, ten times over. The piety 
and wealth of succeeding shoguns and emperors have 
lavished here the art and skill of each age for five 
hundred years. 

I thought by stopping at the Nikko Hotel, which 
lies on the same side as the temples, I should have 
an easy time sight-seeing. I had no reason to re- 
gret my choice, for the Nikko is charming, but there 
is no royal road for sight-seers. When I started out 
in the morning the hotel sent a guide with me whose 
English was fully as picturesque as the guide-book. 
I found afterwards he was a student and was just 
practicing on me. Trying his English on a dog, as 
it were. There are over a hundred temples, Bud- 

[276] 



JAPAN. 



dhist and Shinto both, indiscriminately placed, for 
these religions have lived tolerantly side by side for 
three hundred years, ever since leyasu taught the 
Buddhists that bloody lesson; but the Buddhist faith 
has declined and Shinto is now the national religion. 

But the Buddhist temples here are beautifully 
kept up, as many of them were selected as tombs by 
the Shoguns, since leyasu's time, and are abun- 
dantly endowed. Constant repairs are going on. The 
exteriors are regilt and furbished up, and there is no 
decay, no ruins. 

The temples are all of wood, of the same general 
pattern, rectangular, one-story, with steep roofs and 
projecting eaves, laid on heavy beams, elaborately 
carved and gilded, and the fagades adorned with wood 
carvings, colored and plain. 

It is here one sees the famous three monkeys, 
"see no evil, hear none, speak none,'' with their hands 
respectively on eyes, ears, and lips. 

The wood carvings are mainly of great merit. One 
temple-front is all elephants, another all cats, another 
lions; that is, the Japanese idea of lion, really a big 
pug-nosed dog with bulging eyes. 

The interiors of both Buddhist and Shint temples 

[ 277 ] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

are much the same. Outside is a wide platform, 
the fronts all open, closed at night by sliding doors. 
Within it is a vast expanse of red lacquer floor, walls 
covered with gold lacquer, hideous idols, incense 
burning, gold shrines filled with incomprehensible 
figures, all the paraphernalia of a barbaric yet so- 
phisticated worship. 

When you reach the steps of the temple, felt shoes 
are pulled on your feet, for these priceless floors are 
not to be marred by boot-heels. A half-grown boy 
marks you for his own, and takes you through room 
after room filled with art treasures left by various 
deceased dignitaries. He singsongs his explanations 
and the guide interprets. Every temple has a special 
room for the Emperor and another for the princes. 
There are curious paintings, mostly in sepia, that 
look as if they belonged to the impressionist school, 
for it is impossible to tell what they are about. 
Buddhist priests beat the big drum to keep Buddha 
awake and 'tending to business; he is a very sleepy- 
looking prophet at the best. They intone long pray- 
ers in a nasal singsong, burn cords of incense, and 
scribble endless copies of endless writings on a paper 
that looks like parchment, and sell them to believers. 

[278] 



JAPAN 



Outside in the temple yards are shops where they 
sell charms against disease, written prayers, and postal 
cards. Think of the juxtaposition; but no one seems 
to think it irreverent, because there is no real rever- 
ence. As a matter of fact, Japan has no religion 
that is worthy of the name. There is Ancestor 
Worship, a family spiritualism, a superstition just 
a step above the lowest religions the most barbaric 
tribes of the world acknowledge. But there is no 
concept of a Supreme Being, an Allwise Powgr, 
beneficent, creative, constructive, and omniscient. 
It is a jumble of half-beliefs, superstitions, vague, 
childish, the very infancy of religious thought. The 
higher class Japanese have no religion, the lower 
class merely a superstition. 

At the commencement of the Russo-Japanese war, 
Marquis Ito seriously proposed that the Japanese 
should en masse embrace Christianity, in order to 
secure the sympathy of the Christian powers. He 
feared that they would sympathize with Russia, be- 
cause of Japan's rehgion, or lack of it. 

It was seriously considered by the Council of Elder 
Statesmen, of whom Ito is the head, and there is not 
the slightest doubt that if the Emperor had so de- 
[ 279 ] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

creed Japan would have accepted Christianity with- 
out hesitation. 

As it is, the missionaries are making far more head- 
way in Japan than they are in China. We met many 
converted Japanese. Certainly anything would be 
better than their present jumble of myths and super- 
stitions. The Japanese are getting too wise, too 
modern, to worship a two-headed war god that they 
make themselves in a near-by shop. Ancestor wor- 
ship will remain, but Japan will be Christianized 
within a hundred years very completely. 

Christianity holds out to these people something 
that no other religion offers, something that no other 
religion or cult has ever thought of, — pardon for sin. 
It has been a matter of speculation with modern 
writers for many years why the pagan world accepted 
Christianity so quickly, so readily; why a rehgion 
that in its higher thought is so much above all bar- 
barian conceptions should have so instantly appealed 
to the barbarian world, such as was Rome in the first 
century. I think the answer is not hard, although 
I have never heard it given by anyone. The essence 
of Christianity is that it is a pardon. 

In every barbaric religion, from the earliest ages 
[280] 



JAPAN. 



down to the worship of the present-day Japanese, 
there is no pardon for sin. Sin brings its inevitable 
punishment in this world or the next. The pagans in 
Christ's day believed that Nemesis and the Eumen- 
ides were always at hand to punish transgression. 
There was no escape. There was certain punish- 
ment, retribution both in this world and the next. 
Christ came with a pardon. Belief in him meant not 
simply the forgiveness of sin, but its abolition. The 
washing away not only of the consequence of sin, its 
punishment, but even of the sin itself. 

In our modern revivals, the first aim of the evangel- 
ist is to get his hearers '^ convicted of sin," to feel and 
realize that they are sinners and that pardon is just 
there waiting for them. 

I fancy if one entered a penitentiary with a pardon 
for every inmate who could conscientiously believe 
in any one doctrine, belief would be immediate and 
general. That is what Christianity does. It finds a 
sinful world peopled with sinners, full of sin, and ex- 
tends to every sinner a pardon on very simple terms. 
The only wonder is that real Christians are so few. 
If every one sincerely believed in a future state, every 
ne would be a Christian. That is indisputable. 

[281] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

Given a people that do sincerely believe in a future 
state as do the Japanese, a people that know they are 
sinners, a people who have always believed that the 
punishment of sin was inevitable, and extend to them 
the pardon of Christianity, and it is bound to appeal 
to them. 

The reason that our churches are not filled is the 
fact that we do not many of us have a sincere, pro- 
found belief in a future state. These people have. 
They feel their condemnation for sin, they feel the 
emptiness of their religious rites and superstitions, 
and Christianity appeals to them. 

It follows that about these old temples hangs none 
of the awe and uplift that a great English or Italian 
cathedral gives to even the most thoughtless and 
irreverent. The bizarre decorations, the fantastic 
shrines, the monstrous gods of human handiwork, 
produce nothing but a feeling of curiosity. The 
Japanese themselves wander through these fanes, 
deserted by worshippers, chattering and laughing, 
staring and commenting, but without an atom of 
religious feeling. It is just a show, like a fair with its 
merry-go-rounds and shoot the chutes. 

There is one place, however, where the thoughtful 
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JAPAN. 



may well bare their heads and pause a while in the 
contemplation of greatness brought low. On the 
highest point of one of these great hills, reached by 
many hundred stone steps, winding and zigzagging 
between the giant cryptomeria guarded by heavily 
carven stone balustrades, the work of a long-past 
age and green now with centuries of moss, stands 
the great bronze tomb of leyasu, the founder of 
Japan. It stands behind a rather simple Buddhist 
temple, the faith he professed, just a dome of the old 
bronze with two storks guarding it in front. No 
ornament, no decoration, just the simple, sumptuous 
old bronze. From there you may look out across the 
green landscape far down the winding valley, to the 
Japan he loved and served. No tomb I have ever 
seen, not even that of Napoleon, is more impressive. It 
strikes you by its very simplicity, the simplicity that 
marked his great character, for in all his life he sought 
but one end, the unity and prosperity of Japan. He 
bent everything to that end, and attained his end 
by this very singleness of purpose. 

Nikko is an alpine country; far up in the moun- 
tains and all about it is wild and beautiful scenery, 

[ 283 j 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

lakes and waterfalls and gorges. But why attempt 
to describe them? There is already too much scenery 
in these chapters, and the scenery of Nikko does not 
differ from the beauties of nature elsewhere at this 
season. They say that in the spring, when the 
wistaria and the azalea which cover all the hillsides 
are in bloom, and again in autumn when the maples 
put forth their glory of red and gold, that then it is a 
riot of beauty. 

Certainly it was beautiful in the heart of summer, 
with none of these attractions. It is a dreamy, quiet, 
peaceful old place. A place to bask and loaf, ''the 
world forgetting, by the world forgot." 

Its greatest charm is that of Kioto, that it is still 
Japanese. That here you savor the old country life 
of Japan just as it was before the western invasion. 
It is the Japan that Lafcadio Hearn and Sir Edwin 
Arnold loved and wi'ote of. 

The average traveler through Japan takes a hasty 
glimpse of the coast towns, perhaps sees Tokio, and 
goes away with but little idea of the real Japan. I 
am glad I have seen it before it passes away, as it 
will. The tourists are coming in greater numbers 
every year. Their blighting hand is already on 

[284] 



JAPAN 



Nikko, and the Americans are the worst of all. I 
have made it a rule abroad to avoid all those hotels 
''where all the Americans go." They quickly and 
completely spoil every hotel they patronize. The 
average American abroad spends his money like a 
drunken sailor. He gives the same extravagant 
tips as at home, demands the same kind of hotels he 
gets at home, and as far as possible keeps away from 
those hotels that are characteristic of the country he 
is in. 

You will observe that I regard the average American 
as a poor traveler. He goes abroad mainly to say 
he has been. He might as well stay at home and 
study a guide-book, so far as really seeing the coun- 
try is concerned. 

I made several excursions to near-by waterfalls 
and lakes, always in a rickshaw, and found most of 
the roads good, none bad. Above all, I reveled in 
the country life of Old Japan. I can recommend 
Japan to sated and world-weary travelers for many 
reasons, but above all for this one, that it is always 
picturesque, always novel, many-colored, quaint and 
attractive. Somehow it does not weary you as do 
most foreign lands. I have spent as dull moments 

[ 285 ] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

on the Rhine as I ever did on the Santa Fe, and much 
of Europe is dull and uninteresting. I did not find 
a foot of Japan so. I should think it would set a 
painter crazy with its wealth of color, its picturesque 
outlines, and he would need no paid models to study 
the nude. Maybe I have talked too much about the 
nakedness of Japan, but really it is one of those char- 
acteristic things that impress you. I have heard one 
or two funny stories about this phase. 

Near Mogi, on the Inland Sea, is a summer resort 
much frequented by Japanese for its bathing. A great 
pool is made by a reef that incloses a part of the bay. 
Here men and women bathed together without the 
incumbrance of bathing-dresses for years. Finally 
Occidental ideas made themselves felt, and the au- 
thorities decreed that men and women should not 
bathe together without clothing. This was a sump- 
tuary law, invading individual rights, and did not 
commend itself to the bathers, but they got around 
it all right. A rope was stretched across the pool 
and the men bathed on one side the rope, the women 
on the other. 

Then there was the bathing-master who was in the 
habit of stripping off when he went in the water. 

[286] 



JAPAN. 



The authorities forbade it, and after that he placidly- 
exchanged his shore clothes for a bathing-suit on the 
beach in full view of everybody. The Japanese are 
very literal. 

A friend of mine who was visiting a Japanese 
merchant at the latter' s country home was consider- 
ably shocked when he found the whole family join 
him in his bath in the stream that flowed through 
the garden, ''in the altogether." 

Of course much of this is changing. They are 
acquiring Western prudery. Nor is it easy to account 
for their unblushing display. In tropical climates 
one expects it, but the climate of Japan is much like 
that of Kansas. Doubtless it accounts partly for 
the superb health of these people. They are hard- 
ened by their constant exposure in scanty clothing. 

I left Nikko quite unsatisfied with its beauty, hun- 
gry for more. Some day I shall go back. How 
often we say that! The first time I went to Florida 
I declined an invitation for a trip up the celebrated 
Wekiva river, because I was coming back that fall. 
I was never in the neighborhood again, and never 
took the trip. New scenes beckon us when we make 

[287] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

another trip, and the things we give up because we 
are coming again are never seen. 

We made one side trip at Yokohama to Kamakura, 
ten miles from there, to see the Dai-Butsu, or Great 
Buddha, justly regarded as one of the great monu- 
ments of the world. It is a bronze statue of Buddha, 
sitting on a stone seat some six feet high. The statue 
seated is fifty feet in height, made of bronze plates 
brazed together, hollow inside, and so large that it 
contains a good-sized temple and a stairway leading 
up to the head. It is ninety-seven feet in circum- 
ference and the head is seventeen feet acr ^ These 
measurements give you an idea of its immensity. 
When you consider that this was made in 1238 you 
can realize how far ahead of us these people are in 
bronze-working. But it is not only unique in size 
and material, it is a great work of art. The brooding 
patience of the figure, the beauty of the face, the be- 
nignity of its expression, and the just proportions of 
the whole, mark it as one of the world's masterpieces 
among colossi. 

That was our last of Japan. It was fitting to leave 
it for the last, for it is the greatest of Japan's ancient 
monuments. 

[288] 



JAPAN. 



Home was calling me with a constantly increasing 
insistence, and I shortened my trip a week because I 
was hungry to see again the landfall of the greatest 
country of all. 

The best part of going abroad is the coming home. 
I take the privilege of every American to abuse my 
own country, but as soon as I leave it I begin to 
want to get back. I used to think I should like a 
diplomatic appointment abroad. This trip has cured 
me. I hope to cross the sea again often and see other 
lands, for globe-trotting becomes a habit, but nothing 
could tempt me from America, save a new trip, con- 
stant novelty, scenes ever fresh. 

As I write this on the ship reeling of! the miles 
homeward-bound, my homesickness grows. I even 
doubt if foreign travel pays. I know I shall feel dif- 
ferently after I have been at home a while. I shall 
hear the sea calling me, and the sight of a travel- 
book or the picture of an ocean steamer will set me 
figuring on another trip. 



[289] 



CONCLUSION. 

I am writing this nearly two months after my re- 
turn. I have had time to forget many things, and 
as is usual with travel, the fatigue, the hardship, the 
disagreeable things have passed away, forgotten al- 
most. 

There remains a long succession of beautiful pic- 
tures that will not fade, of novel impressions that 
will not vanish, of friends whom I shall not forget. 

And now in thinking it over I feel that it was a 
great trip, well worth the trouble and expense. It 
has exactly doubled my knowledge of the world. I 
know now, pretty well, that half that is most 
alien to us. That was worth while. I often hear 
people say that they do not want to go abroad till 
they have seen every part of America. Why? What 
is travel for? If you go merely to enjoy, to see 
beautiful sights, America is full of them. If you go 
with an open mind, with a thirst to know the world 
you live in and the people that live in it, then America 
[290] 



CONCLUSION. 



alone cannot satisfy you. There are but three cities 
in this country worth going out of your way to see : 
Boston, New York, and New Orleans. There was 
another, but the earthquake destroyed it, and the 
new San Francisco will be a Chicago or a St. Louis. 
All the others are alike. When you have seen one 
you have seen them all. 

The traveler knows no more of America after he 
has seen all of them than he did when he had seen 
one, for they are all American; that expresses it all. 

There are wonderful scenic beauties, too, but the 
Yosemite, the Yellowstone and the Grand Canon 
are not essential to a knowledge of the world. I am 
not urging anyone else to give them up for a trip to 
Europe, but I prefer foreign travel for the education 
it gives, the broadened outlook, the greater knowl- 
edge of that curious animal, Man. 

I am not urging anyone to go abroad. It is a 
matter of taste, but I find a generally erroneous idea 
of the cost of foreign travel. As a matter of fact, 
America is the most expensive country in the civil- 
ized world to travel in. I can do Europe in an auto- 
mobile cheaper than I can travel by rail, sight-seeing, 
in this country, and far more comfortably, and in- 

[291] 



THE FAR EAST TODAY. 

stead of vast stretches of endless monotony, vapid, 
wearisome, you have a new picture at every turn of 
the road, a new outlook on human life, a new treasure 
for your memory when the trip is over. 

I am often asked if I still prefer America and 
Americans — a very absurd question. Every man 
prefers his ov^^n country, his own people. But no 
man knows America who knows no other country. 
A man who had never seen but one horse would hardly 
be called a judge of horseflesh. It takes a knowl- 
edge of other countries, a standard of comparison, 
to justly appraise our own. We learn then our 
virtues and our faults. It seems to me the ideal 
race would be composite. If I were to make such a 
race I would start with the honesty, the industry 
and the temperance of the Chinese. That would 
make a good foundation for racial character. I 
would add the courtesy and self-control of the Japan- 
ese. Take a little, not too much, of the frugality, 
the wit and the artistic sense of the French. The 
stability and balance I would get from the Germans, 
the tenacity of purpose, the holdfastness, from the 
English. And then I would take from my own 
people the energy, the initiative, the ingenuity, the 

[ 292 ] 



CONCLUSION 



driving-power, and above all as the crown, the saving 
quality, the American sense of humor, that dehght- 
ful, intangible quahty of which we have almost a 
monopoly. 

Possibly in the fullness of time that composite 
may be attained here, but at present we are amal- 
gamating the vices of other nations along with their 
virtues, and the composite is far from ideal yet. 

It seems to me that foreign travel is helping Amer- 
ica, absurdly as many Americans travel. We re- 
turn with a different outlook on life, with a juster 
conception of where we succeed and where we fail, 
with ideas that bear fruit in the betterment of Amer- 
ica, and most of us return more truly Americans. 



THE END. 



[293] 



JUL 29 i908 



/ 



